Bula Fiji!!

There’s no better way to postpone the “I’m leaving Sydney and I want to cry” feeling than by spending 5 days in paradise. The Fijian Islands are only a short 4 hours from Sydney, Australia and are the most beautiful place you can imagine. After a tearful goodbye to our friends and Sydney (and an awesome goodbye breakfast at everyone’s favourite cafe with Mom and Dad before they headed back home) and plenty of rearranging our luggage, Liza, Shannon, Bryan, Sean and I boarded the plane and landed in a place where the air was dense with humidity and hot rain was falling. After gathering luggage, storing bags, exchanging money, making a few friends and spending an hour with a very nice Fijian travel agent to book our first night’s hostel and boat transfers for the week, we finally made it to our air conditioned bunks, had a bite to eat and got some rest.

There are only two words that we know in Fijian: Bula, which means hello, hi, how are you, good morning, good evening, nice to see you, welcome, greetings… and Vinaka, which means thank you.

We woke up to a blue sky and an early boat transfer to Beachcomber Island, about half an hour away from the main island port of Denaru. Beachcomber is the stereotypical deserted island – the only structures on the island belong to the ‘resort’ and all of the inhabitants are tourists or staff. We were there for one night only and immediately dropped our bags in the locked cupboards under our bunks and hit the beach. It may have been morning, but resting on beach chairs and taking occasional dips in the crystal clear water to cool off were just screaming for a pina colada to complete our fantasy. We indulged with the cool slushy drinks and reapplied sunscreen as we soaked up the sun, the water and the breathtaking view. Walking around the island took about eight minutes to complete and we quickly discovered a shallow, salt water, tiled swimming pool on the other side of the island. With the shade of a tree and the tile benches in the water, we spent time there meeting a few fellow travelling students. We also took a little boat trip on the glass bottom boats owned by the resort to feed the fish and check out some of the reef life around the island. Later on, we fed the turtles (not wild, they’re kept in pools near the back side of the island) and we even got to hold them!

Beachcomber is known throughout Fiji as the “party island” and that night proved to be a fairly tame, but satisfying night. We danced and played games and listened to music with our new friends and then made our way to the main hut, where we saw a traditional, but lacklustre Fijian dance performed by some of the staff and local people, followed by a tasting of Kava, a popular Fijian drink. Kava is disgusting – it is made in a large wooden bowl and served in coconut bowls and both resembles and tasted like muddy water. Large quantities of Kava are supposed to give the drinker a very relaxed feeling, but all I felt was my gag reflex telling me that dirt water is not to be consumed. I kept the nasty liquid down, but that was enough to tell me that I was not interested in drinking more. The people at Beachcomber were very friendly, we had a great time with the other travellers, and that night one guy we met was yelling through the screen at Shannon to wake the girl with the purple pants, who he said he was madly in love with from afar and needed to talk with immediately. The conversation went on for about half an hour, until ‘purple pants’ decided to get out of bed and have a chat with the boy. Altogether, it was a pretty funny evening.

The next morning we boarded another boat to Manta Ray Island, about two hours further north in the Yasawa Island chain. The island itself is much larger than Beachcomber, the resort took up only a small part of the land – the rest was full of rocky beaches and hills. We splurged for our own rooms for the three nights (well, two rooms for the 5 of us) and got ready for a few more perfect days. The sand was rocky, as it was at the other island, but the staff was super friendly, the food was incredible (islanders serve a lot of fish, I was in protein-deficient heaven). The days were super hot and the random clouds and breeze were definitely welcomed.

At Manta Ray, we spent our days kayaking, making coconut bracelets (a huge process which involved gathering coconuts, tearing off the outside, sawing the bracelet, sanding the bracelet and digging out the meat), drinking coconut milk, laying on the beach, reading in the hammocks, chatting with the locals, hiking around the nearby beaches and just enjoying our last few days of summer.

On our last day, we took quick showers after lunch and boarded a boat towards the main island. After riding for a few hours, we arrived at Port Denaru, with about 6 hours to kill before our flight to Los Angeles. We decided that our best plan would be to find dinner at the open air mall near the port and then head back to the non-airconditioned airport. We saw signs for a Hard Rock Café, and, though we knew it was incredibly stereotypical of us, we ventured up the stairs to the restaurant. 7 smiling waiters greeted us at the door with a big “BULA” and asked if we had a reservation… obviously, we did not. They seated us anyway (there were plenty of tables) and then handed us a paper menu, one page long, with a short list of entrées and deserts and a note that soft drinks were complimentary. The night was their test party, a pre-opening of sorts where staff from North America was there training the Fijians to be the best Hard Rock staff in the world. For us, it meant endless Coca-Cola Light, and free dinner and dessert! Wired on caffeine, and after a lot of laughs with the folks at Hard Rock, we went back to the airport to rearrange our suitcase, get bitten by a million bugs, and finally cross the Pacific back to America.

~ Rachel

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