Fiji Time

Last weekend Amy, Marcy, Chris and I went to Fiji. Which sounds a bit crazy, it’s not really the sort of place you’d expect to go for a weekend. We went for a long weekend and managed to squeeze in surfing (SUP), pool time, restaurants, hire cars, boat tours, snorkelling on reefs, standing on our own tiny island and visiting the island where “Castaway” was filmed. We came back tired but it was worth it!

We left on Friday and got the early flight to Nadi from Sydney, the flight is about 4 hours, we went straight to the hotel which was on the mainland and enjoyed the pool there and then had dinner at the hotels restaurant which was really nice.

The next day we decided would be relax day, and so we had a late breakfast and then spent most of the time in the hotel just totally relaxing. The weather was fantastic for our entire trip and was so much hotter than Sydney already, at about 31 degrees the entire time. I walked down to the sea thinking I’d go in, but I saw a snake in the water and decided not to.

We looked at organising a boat trip the next day but couldn’t decide which one to get as they all left at different times and Amy and I didn’t want to visit anywhere that we’d already been to last time. We left it in the capable hands of Chris who came back after much discussion with the concierge and managed to get us our own boat for four hours the next day.

The next morning we had to hire a car (we got a little car which had bad boy alloys) to get us to Port Denaru which is where all of the boats leave from. The driving in Fiji is on the left hand side but the roads are pretty bad, at one point there was a 4WD just driving towards us on the wrong side of the road, as the driver didn’t want to go on the dirty part of the road! We got there safely and onto our little boat tour.

The first spot the boat took us to was a little reef that had a 3 metre by 2 metre bit of sand above sea level, it was cool standing on that, our own little island in the middle of the sea. We snorkelled around the reef for a bit and I’ve never seen so many fish in the same location, to the point where I couldn’t just look at one because there was so many swimming in front of my eyes at the same time!

Next stop was the Island that the movie Castaway was filmed. We shouted Wilson! a few times and the boat driver showed us some of the sites from the movie. Chris re-enacted the fishing scene and I sent an email (I had 5 bars and GPRS) – not sure why Tom Hanks took so long to get off the island, it’s surrounded by resorts (not actually on the Island though).

We went back via a resort with the same name had a cocktail and then returned to the mainland and visited Hard Rock Cafe Fiji, which had exactly the same food as every other Hard Rock Cafe in the world but was good fun. We then did the drive back to the hotel which was extremely tiring. Marcy, Chris and Amy managed to get sunburnt on the boat and were feeling it when we got back, I luckily managed to avoid it!

The next day we sat by the pool and then made our way back to the airport arriving back on Monday evening and safely home by 9pm. One of the best long weekends ever! Thanks Marcy for the photos.