Day 45 to 49 - a week in Vanuatu (to be continued...)

On Sunday morning, we took an Air Fiji flight from Suva airport (at Nausori, half an hour inland) 967km west to an island called Efate, landing at pretty Port Vila, capital of the 80-odd islands that form the Republic of Vanuatu (a nation of 4710 sq miles and 225k inhabitants). 

The great views (especially the coastline along the Mamanuca Islands leaving Fiji at Nadi - must think about going there ...

....and arriving into Port Vila)

were a perfect introduction to a week of blue-skied, clear-watered loveliness.  

Port Vila is a compact harbour town, right on the water of course, with a bustling market (where we've stocked up on fruit and veg, admired the flowers on sale - artfully displayed!

and had great fried fish and rice brunches with the locals - and laughed at how the first-thing-in-the-morning prices increase as soon as a tourist boat docks!), but its glory lies in access to the surrounding reefs and coral gardens.

So we've treated ourselves to a couple of nights dedicated to lazing and snorkelling; sadly we've no underwater camera so you're spared endless fuzzy angelfish! Suffice to say though that we spent most of the time in the water and didn't get bored.

PS. On the below pic of the view from our verandah, zoom in between the foliage for our nearest neighbour; you wouldn't think so but he's about 4" wide... 

Day 43 and 44 - trip overnight to Nananu-i-Ra

On the very northern tip of 'our' island is a small personal paradise called Nananu-i-Ra (Ra being the 'county' on the coast) and we headed up there, on the King's Road, for : a four-hour mini-exploration of the countryside

to make some purchases and new friends

and see how people live

And lie back and enjoy the beautiful peace of it all (and get burned backs by snorkelling for too long in the coral garden off the jetty!)

Day 42 - Fijian feast

Sheila (our hostess, Duncan's cousin, smiling below) works with a lovely Fijian woman who wanted to show us how Fijian food is done properly and kindly threw a dinner party last night with a veritable Fijian feast - whole baked fish, palu sami (parcels of coconut cream wrapped in taro leaves baked in the umu or oven), seaweed with pineapple, chicken baked in banana leaves and served with sour berry sauce, roasted pork, taro, fish in lolo and banana... and, as if that wasn't enough, mango mousse and papaya baked in coconut and spices. All eaten on her terrace overlooking the twinkling lights of the port, with wise words and observations of her years in Fiji.

Earlier in the day, we'd stopped by Government House, the official residence of the Fijian President, with a ceremonial guard in dress uniform (including the marvellous, pinked white sulu)





Rather less spendid however is the sad Parliament building, abandoned and neglected since the last coup

Day 41 - out and about in Suva : part II

Back to the market today (topping up my papaya hoard) and ventured upstairs to where the real action happens.  

Kava (the local Fijian name is yaqona) is very popular throughout the Pacific, prepared here in Fiji as a drink called "grog" (I'd seen it advertised on hoardings but wrongly assumed grog was a more generic term) by pounding sun-dried kava root into a fine powder, straining and mixing it with cold water for drinking (traditionally) from the shorn half-shell of a coconut, called a bilo. It's often drunk at parties but I'm reliably informed that it's an acquired taste

The other recent discovery is cassava cake...

Followed later by an evening cocktail by the water

Day 40 - out and about in Suva part I

The rain having stopped, we decided that it was about time to explore in town.  In the flea market, alongside the usual sarongs and eye-wateringly-bright shirts, a more exotic local mix : ladies industriously plaiting ribbons of dyed raffia into metre-long crescent-shaped garlands (apparently made to order for any special occasion - wedding, birthday, anniversary, passing, one lady told me) 



and, talking of "made to order", we couldn't help noticing two competing funeral services (you'll notice that the coffins have a clear plastic peep-hole over the visage...)

Day 39 - what to do on a wet Monday in Suva

The Fiji Museum, obviously.  Not too big and certainly not flashy, the main draw is the leather soles of the shoes apparently worn by Irish Methodist, Revd Thomas Baker, when his evangelising got him into hot water with a group of Fijian cannibals in 1867 (he has the dubious honour of being the only known missionary to Fiji who met his end in that way - I wonder whether that's where the "hot water" saying comes from??); personally  I preferred the small exhibit case wherein Fiji celebrates its two qualifying Olympians - not that they won anything you understand, but they were there! 

Talking of hot water though, we noticed that we've swapped one hazard zone for another... 

Day 38 - lazy Sunday

Sunday is a day primarily set aside for singing your heart out at church and being peaceful. Once a month though, there's a buzzing market at which local folk sell their wares - from driftwood carvings to jars of papaya jam, robust-looking shopping bags artfully stitched from rice sacks to delicate seashell-windchimes, home-made spicy patties (well, it was close to lunchtime!) and biscuits to jewellery.

Followed by a walk by the waterfront

Day 37 - a Saturday in Suva

Saturday morning so what could be more normal than a trip to the local market?  The Suva market reminded us of our usual London one, but on super-tropical-steroids...

We experimented with some clams from the lady below but sadly they proved well beyond our culinary prowess...(and we reverted to the stirfried okra!)

Having worked up quite an appetite with toe-dipping in the noticeably warmer-than-SF Pacific waters

Day 36 (allowing for that time-zone - the dateline stole 17th October) - Nadi to Suva, Viti Levu island, Fiji

Trips on local buses, we love 'em. 

F$32 (that's about £6 per person to you) for the 4 hours from Nadi airport to the main bus station in downtown Suva (from where Sheila's husband, Deddy, picked us up). The road around the southern hemisphere of the island (Nadi is at about 9 o'clock and Suva at 5 o'clock) is fairly good, sometimes a wee bit bumpy, and first impressions of Fiji are beautiful and very, very green (and it certainly had been raining before we landed).  

As the island interior is hilly (peaks rise to over 4000 feet and are heavily forested) and you can't easily drive straight from north to south, most of the traffic is coastal - the road hugs the ocean pretty much all the way round the main island where Sheila lives (Viti Levu), which is home (along with the other big island, Vanua Levu) to 87% of the population - everyone else lives on one of the other 104 inhabited islands which comprise the archipelago.  

While we're at it, a few more scene-setting Fiji stats : with all those islands comes a lot of water : the Republic covers a total area of 75k sq miles, of which only 10% is land; it lies midway between Vanuatu (which we'll be visiting in a week or so's time) to the west and Tonga to the east (and the north island of NZ is 1300 miles south); the dateline ought by rights to sever the islands but it's bent to give uniform time to all of the group; the climate is tropical - warm most of the year round with minimal extremes though the "warm season" is Nov to April and the cooler season (still +70°F) May to Oct;  rainfall is apparently variable (we haven't seen much yet though the warmer season experiences heavier rainfall, especially inland) ; similarly, winds are supposed to be moderate though it's been very windy since we arrived, and the once-a-year-or-so cyclone happened a short while ago so hopefully we won't get another! 

Anyway, our first day in Fiji ended with sundowners (absent the sunset, mostly, unfortunately, but very very nice indeed)...

Day 34 and 35 - last day in San Francisco and away to Nadi Airport, Fiji

Usual last-minute packing frenzy and wondering how we ever fitted everything in. Then a lovely lazy day at the Golden Gate Park, handily bordering the Pacific for me finally to catch that toe-in-the-Pacific-brrrr moment  

And, just like that, our month on the Pacific coast was over (clear highlights included Crater Lake and the majestic Columbia gorge, pretty Astoria and certainly the innumerable quirky small towns and interesting people; a very few predictable low-lights : miserable weather meaning not a sniff of an orca in the San Juan Islands and the shutdown closures cramping our style in the Olympic National Parks.  Overall, hugely enjoyable : relaxing, funny, beautiful, sometimes unexpected and rather peculiar, sometimes unexpected and quite marvellous)

So onward and upwards - and some real shenanigans getting to Fiji.  You'll remember that we were scheduled to fly from SF to Auckland, wait a bit and change to another plane to come from Auckland to Fiji?  When we checked in at SF, they told us that the crew apparently was going to go over their legal time limit and so the plane to Auckland was going to touch down in Nadi airport to pick up some new crew.  So - did we want to get off there?  Er, yes of course, please, we chorused - provided that our bags make it there too.  Yes, you've guessed the rest of the story, except that it did eventually have a happy ending despite there being a full jumbo's-worth of luggage to search.  Just as we were completing the AWOL-luggage form and handing out the Fiji address to which to send the bags when they eventually made it back from Auckland, the ground-crew reported that someone had finally consulted the captain and he'd evidently remembered his post-Lockerbie aeronautic law and the thou-shalt-not-knowingly-take-bags-without-passengers rule and announced that they were going to root around in the hold after all. And ta-daa! - out came our stuff.  Because we had landed before the first departure of the bus from Nadi airport to Suva (where Duncan's cousin Sheila lives), we were, in any event, hanging around, so it proved to be smiles all round (though a reminder of why we usually have only hand luggage!!)  

When we arrived at 3am, as you'd expect, we were the only souls there so, once we'd been escorted through immigration and into arrivals, it was just us and the echo of the gentle snores of the airport security guard until Friday morning life restarted.  

Day 33 - Half Moon Bay back up to San Francisco

Penultimate day of the US leg (clocking up 4000 miles just as we pulled into Half Moon Bay) - then some last coast views 

before Highway 1 gave up its cute, wiggling-along-by-the Pacific country cousin self and returned us to a five-lane monster. Still, some nice views down the bay towards the city

As well as a bus to Fisherman's Wharf, we stopped off at the altogether more impressive City Hall and Civic Centre (with cracking rendition of the state seal).

We fly at 9pm tomorrow, via Auckland, to Fiji so apologies for the hiatus in proceedings. Back on Friday, having hopped the dateline and missed out on Thursday 17th (and landed on Duncan's birthday) 

Day 32 - down the Californian coast : part III (Santa Cruz to Half Moon Bay)

It had to happen eventually.  After all my whinging and when we weren't even looking and were instead focussed on the pelicans skating over the wave-tips, sealions and dolphins frolicking and dancing, and sea otters lazing on their backs to crack a shellfish (and fighting off opportunistic, thieving gulls that plagued them), there was a puff of breath in the distance and someone whispered, optimistically, "Whale?".  

Far in the distance, but quite clear through binocs, breath in the air, a shining back, a fluke.  Hurrah.

Day 31 - down the California coast - part II (past SF to Santa Cruz)

And the final stretch back to SanFran, in glorious sunshine and fantastic views.

And on past SF to a town called Santa Cruz, about 70 miles south along the coast.

We also drove past a number of farms selling... pumpkins (what they do for the rest of the year is anyone's guess) but they've fields and fields of them to get rid off between now and Thanksgiving.  In fact, the closer you look, the more you realise that pumpkins are biiig business and taken pretty seriously...