One nice thing I hadn't anticipated was how clear the stars would be at night. Since Fiji is in the middle of the Pacific with nothing around, there is so little light pollution it's easy to see the Milky Way on an average night. Three out of the Four nights we were there we could see it.
Children work. When we were told we needed to get a guide in the local village to see the waterfall, we were presented with a very serious 7-year-old boy who along our walk would stop and very seriously point to something and say, "This is a tree", or, "This is the house". We were happy to have the little guy instead of the other guides we saw simply because he was so quick and we practically ran by the other hikers to the waterfall. At the waterfall he was searching for tiny prawns with his sister and skipping rocks, counting "Dua, Rua..." (1, 2...). By the end of the trip he had shed his serious guide demeanor and was singing us "I'm a Little Teapot", and we taught him "No More Monkeys Jumping on the Bed".
Another experience we had driving along the Queens Highway (the ONLY, two lane highly) was stopping at a stand along the side of the road to buy a coconut to drink from. A boy that was perhaps twelve sold us the coconut and his slightly older friend took out a machete and cut it open in front of us. It's no big deal for children to use machetes. I cringed because I thought he might accidentally cut off his arm the way he was doing it, but he was a pro.
I will probably reflect more on the trip later when I have more time, but here are a few pictures...
View from our room
Breakfast view
Cutting open the coconut I found
Walking to the golf course
Lucky #2 golf cart was ours
Kava tasting
Hiking to the waterfall
Massi, our tour guide
Michael taking a dip (it was really cold)
South Sea Island, where we did lots of water activities
Sigatoka Sand Dunes National Park
(Fiji's first national park founded in 1989)
More pictures and GoPro video to come in the future.
And how were the fancy little water bottles? :)
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