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Nadi
Sri Siva Subramaniya Savami Temple at the bottom of town. And so we've arrived at the 'holiday at the end of the holiday' (part 1)!
We arrived in Nadi (pronounced Nandi) armed only with a slightly old Lonely Planet (cheers, John) and with basically no idea about to do for the next 10 days. Nadi isn't as bad as everyone says, although it does feel a bit like someone took 2 streets straight out of somewhere like Kuala Lumpur or Delhi and dumped them in the middle of a green paradise complete with all the dirty old buses, smog, people giving you the hard sell etc! Most people we spoke to, both here and on our trip so far, said that the best thing to do is to get off the main island (Vitu Levu) ASAP and head to one of the islands in the Mamanuca or Yasawa groups to see the 'real Fiji'. So we booked ourselves on a boat to Mana Island, about 30km away, and headed off!
Mana island was beautiful, but has a slight Cold War-Berlin atmosphere! A large, Japanese-owned, very expensive resort covers nearly half the island and has marked off it's territory with a large fence going across the island to let
Mana Island
Fire dancing! Fanstastic the rest of us know that we're definitely not welcome to use any of their facilities! To further complicate matters, 2 of the backpacker lodges (including the one we were staying at!) were owned by rivalling brothers who tried to bad mouth each other etc for years. However, they've both since passed away so things have cooled down a bit. Having paid upfront for 4 nights, we immediately had a crisis of what we'd actually do for all that time - it only takes a few hours to walk around the whole island and there's not too much on offer other than the beach! However, once we got the hang of Fiji-Time we ended up having a pretty good few days, mostly just eating, drinking and sunning ourselves! After day one, the manager of our place had gone back to the mainland for a few days, so the rest of the staff were a tad slack when it came to organising any fun and games in the evening etc, but Fiji Time prevailed and all was good.
Also, an interesting sidenote about Mana is that on the far side of the island (well, it's not that far but you
Mana Island
Survivor: Fiji know what we mean), there's the set for the Amercian 'Survivor: Fiji' series, that was on in NZ while we there (almost certainly also kicking about somewhere in FreeView hell)! Basically, if they didn't know about the expensive resort, Fijian village and backpackers they must have been very, very stupid (or, more likely, told/paid not to notice).
We returned to the mainland with our appetite whetted for reality TV sets and headed down to the Coral Coast to the BeachHouse backpackers, where they filmed the hit TV show 'Love Island' (don't you dare call them celebrities), along with our fellow Mana escapees Jaime and Stacy. The place was fantastic - pool, beach, bar, food, kayaks, culture and Kava (traditional Fijian ceremony drink)! We all had a great few days and have decided to give the next backpacker who says 'you have to get off the main island in Fiji' a good smack in the mouth.
And now we're back in Nadi to fly off tomorrow to Rarotonga in the Cook Islands for part 2 of the Holiday-Holiday, and our last stop before returning to good old blighty.
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nik
non-member comment
soso jelous right about now, hope all is goin well, n hope lucas foot is on the mend =) guessn u cant update in rarotonga, theres like one computer on the island and it costs like $20 and its dial up haha... make sure u have dinner at the pawpaw patch in raro, its yumm az... anyways have fun n see ya in england one day =)