last day in fiji

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well I'm on the ship again and am having a blast meeting all the cool ppl. i had some passport/ medication problems but iv gotten them all sorted out (i thought i only needed malaria meds for a week but it turns out i need them for 80day!!) but luckily med are ridiculously cheap here so evverything is hunky dory! btw we're not aloud to swear on the boat, even though iv dropped the ball a few times, usually while getting myself hurt in some form or other, so we have to resort to random catch phrases. So after spending two days on the pacific grace 'bonding' and doing orienteering we released the mooring lines and sailed to this tiny island village which maby had 150, prob less, ppl in it. there was one woman who spoke English well and she gave us a tour of the town, which reminded me a lot of the shanty towns I saw in guatimala 5 years ago with the tin roof sidings and random chickens pecking around. At that point the majority of the crew decided to go climb up this giant mountain to the right of the village, me being of a more sensible type, decided to hike the rolling hill to the other side of the town! so 5 other girls and I all met up with this strong looking man (all the young men here look like perfect rugby players) who was blind in one eye took us to the top of the ridge so we could see into the resort on the next island/valley and the grace out in the cove. the heat was so sweltering we had to find a mango tree to eat under and run back down the hill into the village, where we met back up with the woman who could speak english. After so ice cold drinks (my first in fiji! and prob last) she took us to a small waterfall river which had little pools which we all thankfully jumped into fully clothed to cool off, it was the most wonderful thing we could have asked for! when we were done cooling off we head back down to the beach to see if any of the others were back from there climb yet, just to see them just reaching the summit! (I though they were trees!) so we decide to hitch a ride back to the boat with one of the local men.
once onboard we set up the rope swing and spent the afternoon swinging off the boat and having salt water showers! once everyone else had come back and gotten 'clean' we had dinner and attempted to paddle back to shoar in the pitch dark in very tippy dorys with several ppl inside them! not an easy task, once on shore we sat in a showing area were on this grassy square they preformed 4 traditional dances (sword, 'thrust' and two fire dances) the fire dances almost ended badly with some of the fire landing near caley and rebecca almost catching her bag on fire! then we entertained them with some singing of our own (at this point it was raining buckets), and they tried to teach us a v. amusing dance, which was prob for their own amusement, until the rain abated slightly.
now we just sailed back from the island and are in latoka again to pick up a few last min things. We head out to Vanuatu tomorrow on a 4 to 5 day straight sail! talk to you all then... possibly!

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