Day Two Fiji

On the ground in Fiji pretty much on time at 05.15 and thankfully, so was our luggage.  Checked in with Rosie Tours (no relation to Fifi Le Snapper from the cruise blog) for our transfer to the Outrigger on the Lagoon Hotel.  Once the other passengers were on board we were off to the hotel.  Journey time was scheduled for about 1hour 15 mins.  What we hadn’t bargained for was that the driver had been to the same driving school as my old Italian boss at Olivetti.  Not only that, but he’d had the same conversion to his vehicle.  i.e. The accelerator pedal had been removed and an ON/OFF switch installed in it’s place.  So it was flat out or stationary with nothing in between.  At least Michele Barrata’s car was a Jag, this was a 20 seater coach with a trailer!!  Anyway we arrived at the hotel in one piece, but not before stopping off at a corner shop, which his brother or some distant relation owned to stock up with bottled water – cheaper than the hotel he reckoned.

Checked in and showered, it was time for the buffet breakfast, followed by a few hours round the pool.  Rain has stopped play as it’s now chucking it down.  Par for the course at this time of the year, so we’re told.  From what we’ve seen of it the hotel looks very acceptable and I think we’ll probably be able to recover from the 21 hours flying quite nicely.

Managed to stay awake all day and into the evening, so we decided to eat in the Baravi Restaurant, which serves Asian food in the evenings.  We dined on Thai crab cakes, made from local crabs that only a few hours earlier were wandering around the local mangrove swamp.  If this was the UK, they’d probably be done under the trades description act as they were not Thai at all.  Maureen had a mixture of Chinese starters followed by Sizzling King Prawns and I finished with Beef in Black Bean sauce.  All very nice and lots of it.  Won’t be washing diner down with a bottle of red at any time, as wine is unbelievably expensive here.  In the hotel, a cheap Australian red is around 20 UK pounds and even in a liquor store in town it’s around 10 -12 pounds for something we would pay 4-5 pounds for at home.

All the restaurants are open on all four sides and  as we were eating dinner we could look out and see the most enormous bats flying around.  They must have had a wingspan of about 2 Feet or more and looked quite spooky as they flew around the tree tops.

It had been a tiring 48 hours so we finally we succumbed to the call of our bed and retired around 10pm.