FIJI!

Fiji was awesome!! We spent 8 days visiting the Yasewa (or something like that) island group. Kate finished up her dive corse on the Blue Lagoon of Brooke Shields' fame. We spent the next 4 days on an island called Waya. We spent the first night in the dorm room, but the light never turned off because it was connected to the generator and the drunk English backpackers kept coming in and waking everyone up so from then on we camped in a tent. In the morning, Kate went fishing while I slept in a hammock on the beach. Unfortunately, I slept on my book funny and hurt my neck so I took some drugs and slept some more while Kate visited the local village over the hill. It was decided that the next night we would go stay in the village at a man named Semi's house. Semi has SEVEN kids. They range in age from 16 months to 14 years and they are most likely the spawn of Tasmanian devils. Village life was quite interesting. One morning we awoke to the sound of a pig being attacked by a pack of domestic dogs. It is a very pleasant sound and I think alarm clock makers should add that to the list of sounds available to arise to. The food was absolutely yummy as long as you didn't think that it came from the one room house that all 9 family members lived in (the 16 month old not yet potty trained and there are no diapers in Fiji) and which seemed to have a bit of a mouse problem. On Sunday, we went to Fijian church service. It was amazing to hear them sing, but the sermon was a bit long considering it was in the tribal dialect. After a bit of a lie down (called "Fiji time"), we hiked over the other hill to take the kids back to boarding school. Once there we helped our new friend who is trying to be a professional photographer/journalist take school photos of all the kids. It was hilarious!! These children were so excited to have their picture taken. The next day we had to be back on the big boat at 3:30 pm to get to the mainland in order to catch our flight to Oz the next day. We decided to go for a hike with our photographer friend (Merica) to the mountain top. The way up was fairly easy and since we had a professional with us we decided to take an epic butt picture. This involved Kate and I doing some serious rock climbing. After the photo shoot was over, we all 3 started our decent down. This did not go smoothly. We managed to get very lost. we could easily see where we wanted to be, but the vegetation was so thick that it was hard to get to. That was combined with the fact that the hillside was littered with ledges that were concealed by vegetation so you never really knew if the shrubs you were standing on had solid ground directly beneath it. The vegetation was so thick it would support all of our body weight and then some. At one point, I had slid down this slope on my ass and caught on to a charred tree before the log under me went over a small cliff. Nothing like a nice stroll to keep the blood pumping. After 2.5 hours of getting lost we finally made it back to the path and eventually back to the village. I would like to take this opportunity to take full responsibility for getting us lost. I have no idea where the trail went and we could not backtrack and find it, but it was there somewhere because it was the exact same trail we had ascended on. We didn't have time to analyse what went wrong. We had just enough time to pack up our stuff, get back over the hill, eat Oreos, and catch our boat. I would show you the epic picture, but it is stuck on the camera at the moment.

So much for hiking in Fiji. . .now it is on to Australia. We are currently in Brisbane catching up with some mates and head out in the morning to spend a couple of days surfing in Byron bay. Eventually, we will make our way to Sydney and hang out there for a couple of days before Kate heads out to Asia.