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Published: December 12th 2006
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After what was an unnecessarily late night at Skylodge we managed to drag ourselves out of bed and get down to reception to book our onward island journey for that day so we wouldn't have to stay another night there, waste another night in Nadi and generally be very disappointed with ourselves. Well I say we, me first, then Kev and Sarah and eventually The Chief after much coaxing. We three had decided to go to Beachcomber for a few reasons: The first was the whole "party island" reputation so we felt we really should at least drop in on the place, the second was that Andy "Human Jukebox" Smith was there as we'd learnt the day before, and the third was we had neither the will nor the inclination to do any research into going somewhere else. Plus we had about twenty minutes until the bus that took you to the port left and we had yet to book anything. The Chief had his heart set on going to Bounty Island, but due to his reluctance to get out of bed he missed that bus, which left fifteen minutes earlier, and ended up joining us on the Beachcomber trip. So
we four made our way down to the port, very tired, bought up the few essential supplies we'd need - water and beer - and jumped on the boat for our journey to the Mamanucas.
The boat itself was quite pleasant, if not a little long considering you can see Viti Levu from Beachcomber quite clearly, and we arrived, did the whole check-in thing and got to the dorm. The one dorm room on Beachcomber is about 80 beds, just a big room filled with bunkbeds, and half of it was sectioned off for refurbishing which tells you something immediately about the amount of people there. We pottered around the dorm for a while, ran into Andy, and then did a circuit of the island which took less than ten minutes in total, it's that small. At around three we went to watch some of the staff feeding the three adolescent turtles they have there and got to hold some very tiny baby ones for ourselves. Then it was a case of trying to find something else to do in order that we wouldn't start the boozing too early. On the way into the island we passed by a
small sandbank that sticks out of the water no more than a couple of feet and couldn't have been more than 100 square feet which was between three-quarters to a mile from the island itself and had the idea that it might be cool to kayak over to it. Unfortunately when we went to the kayak shack they didn't have five free boats so again we had to sit around on the broken coral beach for a while until those that had them came back. Eventually, after much thumb-twiddling we got out onto the sea and rode over to the small island, my weak girlish arms not serving me particularly well, passing over coral reefs and deep bluewater on the way and managing to spot a ray lurking nearby. After a few photocalls and a bit of floating around over the reef, which was rather essential for me to try and rest my arms, we headed back and got ready for dinner and the evening's entertainment. The staff put on a bit of a war-dance show for us, similar to the one in Mango Bay but not as good, and then they had a live band playing through the night
Dawn Over Treasure Island
We really, really should've been in bed by this point. far too loudly for the amount of people there. It wasn't until midnight rolled around that Andy broke out the guitar again and we were treated once more to a beach rendition of some awesome acoustic anthems. At one point the group behind us had Naive by The Kooks playing quite loudly on their i-Pod speakers, and it being one of Andy's little showpieces he - intoxicated of course - started up with it at the same time singing (shouting pretty much) at them in a very annoyed fashion which was a lot of fun for all concerned; we'd obviously boosted his ego somewhat at Volivoli. The rest of the night/morning continued along the same lines, some weird Aussie DJ joined us and was trying to coax people back to his "yacht" for some rum and a couple of quite rude Kiwis got into the mix too but eventually they all trickled away until it was just Andy, Kev, The Chief and myself left at about 05:00 when Andy stopped playing. We chilled out on the beach a bit more and watched the sun rise before having a quick game of drunken volleyball with the staff that were up and beginning to prepare breakfast at around 06:30 - I don't think we got the ball over the net once - then chilled out some more before eventually getting to bed at about 07:30 - 08:00.
The next morning I was rudely awoken at 11:00 by a member of staff because I had only booked in for one night so I either had to check-out or book in another night. I was in absolutely no mood to try and organise boats and I'd already missed the northward one so I checked in and got back into bed for some more sleep. That second day I didn't really do anything at all. We lost The Chief who had to head back to Nadi to catch his onward flight to Thailand and we just spent most of the day lying around and not doing just trying to stay awake till a reasonable hour so as to not fuck up our sleep patterns. We watched the crab racing in the evening, and managed to struggle to stay up until 20:30 before finally crashing out.
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