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November 5th 2008

Published: November 5th 2008

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Amy and Simon

South Sea Island

Our first Island was tiny, you could literally walk round it in 5 minutes

Bula!!

After a fun few days back in Auckland (including a stressful 2 hours for me running around the shops trying to fund something for Amy's birthday) we flew to Nadi in Fiji.

We didn't have a guide book about Fiji or have anything booked or in fact know anything about it at all apart from hopefully it should be hot, so in true Amy and Simon travelling style we went along with some tour agent who approached us as soon as we arrived in the airport and then spent hours in their office while some friendly Fijian lady explained everything there was to know about Fiji and where to go. In summary, her recommendations were to leave mainland, get to an Island, and then slow yourself down to Fiji time by sitting around, doing a bit of swimming, snorkelling, sleeping and having a cocktail or two....so thats what we did.

The next morning we got on the first boat and soon got to a tiny Island called South Sea, about 30 minutes off the mainland. By tiny, I mean tiny! It took about 5 minutes to walk around the Island on the beach or a slightly longer

Our seats on the beach

Another busy day was spent mainly sitting and sleeping...

10 minutes to swim or Kayak round it in the sea. We had a really relaxing couple of days and nights there, swimming, snorkelling, kayaking, chatting with people (it seems loads of travellers go to Fiji for a week or so to relax en route to somewhere else) and then that kind of set the tone for the next week.

Every couple of days or so we hopped back on the boat, headed to another Island in the Yasawa group, and found another beach to laze around on. Every so often we would do something slightly more energetic like snorkelling (the fish and the coral were amazing, soo colourful, probably the best we've seen!), visiting a local village, doing a bit of line fishing (neither of us managed to catch anything, in fact we had a couple of fish on our lines a few times but they always managed to get away...whoops!), doing some Fijian dancing, learning to weave bookmarks and bracelets and drinking Kava (a weird Fiji drink that is meant to relax you and numb your mouth and tongue). Fiji also had the honour of hosting Amy's birthday, not a bad way to reach the grand old

Sydney opera house at night

age of 28.

After a week or so of that, we felt sufficiently relaxed (even maybe a bit restless) and were ready to get back to the hard business of seeing the world. We've been here in Sydney for two days now and, along with watching the American election, have just about had enough time to see the opera house (I'd always thought that it was just one big funky building, but no, its actually 3 smaller ones), the harbour bridge and even last night go on a ghost tour round the older Rocks district. The "highlight", I guess, of the ghost tour was a particularly sinister and dark alley where one of the people on the tour had to suddenly run off and another randomly burst into tears as she was overcome with sadness. All a bit weird, but nothing that we could see or feel.

And that brings us up to date again. The rough plan from here is to spend a bit more time in and around Sydney, then Melbourne, Tasmania, Uluru, Cairns and finally Brisbane but we'll see. We've got nothing booked of course!!

Hope everyones well and enjoying the dark evenings!