Fiji

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December 10-15: We ended up staying at Walu Beach the whole time we were in Fiji. We got in two "snorkeling trips" where we went a few kilometers from the resort in a speedboat. The first was to "Honeymoon Island", popular with day trippers (no one lives there but a caretaker) where the coral was really great. There was a kind of a shelf of coral extending maybe 25 meters from the shore of the island before the reef dropped off into deep water. The coral was very varied and colorful, and it was possible to see some really interesting fish by diving down a few meters along the dropoff. The second trip we took was to "South Bank", is a reef and sandbar that is just offshore of our island a few km down the coast. The coral there wasn't as interesting and it was all fairly flat at about 2 meters of water, but the number and variety of fish was the best we've seen anywhere. In about an hour of paddling around we must have seen about 80 different kinds of fish, including quite a few that we've never seen before. Also, they were absolutely everywhere, including clouds of small (about 1.5 cm) blue fish trying to blend in near blue coral, hundreds of black and white striped fish and all manner of angelfish. I also saw for the first time an anemone and an orange fish which spent a lot of its time among its tentacles. We also went snorkeling off the beach a few times, with results similar to what we'd seen in Thailand off the beach there, except with more variety of fish but less variety of coral and other animals. We also borrowed a small catamaran which we sailed with two people we met, a German guy named Carl and an English guy named Tom. Our original plan was to try to sail out to some reefs in the little bay, but we couldn't figure out a way to make the boat stop or tether it to anything so we just ended up sailing around. We spent the rest of the time reading by or in the pool or along the beach. There were quite a few toads living along the path that we had to shoo off on our way back to the lodge after dinner. There was also a really cheeky species of bird with long legs that seemed to always lurk around in the hopes of hopping onto tables in the dining area to pick at unattended leftovers. In the end, our impression of Walu Beach was pretty positive, as it was reasonably priced and a fair amount to do. The Fijian staff we all quite friendly and remember our names, though they never seemed to know who was going on what day and there seemed to be some degree of disorganization at all times, and the rooms were sorely lacking mosquito nets, since the mosquitos on the island were among the most vicious we encountered anywhere. There was "entertainment" in the evening which was mostly focused on getting the guests to interact and meet each other--kind of a pub quiz, arm wrestling, kava drinking and hermit crab racing. When we left, we checked out at 10am, they loaded us onto a little launch and took us out to meet a larger boat, and we went from the dock to a hotel across from the airport where we rented a day room so we could have a shower / pool / internet. At 10pm we flew to LAX, and arrived at 2pm the same day, or about 8 hours before we left. So we got back all the time we had lost flying east all those months. Anyway, the first thing we did getting to the USA was to eat a burrito, and then flew to San Francisco to meet our friends Peter and Julie (see Thailand). Julie picked us up in a new red convertible, so we knew we were finally in America.

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Photos

Fiji sunset
Sunset on Walu Beach.

Walu Beach
The view from our hut.