Wild Places and Open Spaces

For pictures click HERE

Our much anticipated Yasawa Islands trip began with a bus which picked us up in front of our hotel under early morning sunny skies. The bus meandered around the hotels in Nadi, to finally arrive at the very posh Denerau Resort where our catamaran would depart.

We squared up our bill and hoped that somehow the Fiji logistics would eventually sort itself out and leave us with no surprises on our nine day excursion. Everything was pre-booked through “Tomu the travel agent” at the airport, and everything (much to our utter amazement) went very smoothly.

Now that we sort of understand how some things work, we would book everything on our own as we go along, but when you are new to Fiji, and world travel, things can be very cryptic and and little daunting when trying to aquire information. Believe us when we say; ask a Fijian a question, you will almost surely get some strange answer. Generally one needs to ask the same question from several different angles to acquire a semi-thorough answer. Fiji is a very mysterious place to be in that regard.

Anyway, we wended our way through the beautiful islands for four hours under blue skies and calm seas to our destination on Nacula Island. Our big catamaran comes to a drifting stop all the little boats from the ‘resorts’ in the area to come out to drop off and pick up their guests. The boats are not that large, and at times of heavy seas they could, and did get a little over exciting! For our first stop though everything was rather idyllic and the whole area (including the Blue Lagoon film location) was just stunning.

Nabua Lodge was a simple, quiet place in tranquil waters which had excellent snorkelling right out front of the basic bures (little straw huts with thatched roofs) where we would live for the next three days.

The food was rather basic, but at least we didn’t have to wander around the supermarket to look for food and best of all we didn’t have to cook it. The staff pretty much kept to themselves, which was okay since we met some POMS (British people….the Aussie’s call them POMS as a friendly jab at them) we really got on well with, but if there weren’t guests to get along with, one may feel a touch alienated.

Fijians are generally friendly, quiet people with poor math skills – which tend to work in their favour normally?! The way things work at Nabua were at times a little curious. No one ever has any change so when buying drinks we sign our names and how much we owe in a ledger book, and square up whenever we want basically. I noticed when I got around to paying my bill, I was the only one to look at the ledger. The girl who handled the money remained completely detached from the accounting end. She told me to tell her how much I owed and to write ‘paid’ beside all my names. I literally could have written paid beside everyone’s name and she wouldn’t have said boo! Unfortunately, looking through the book I found so many unpaid bills throughout. Just goes to show if you’re trusting people will take advantage of you – too bad.

All in all, Nabua was an enjoyable time – pretty good food, new friends, great water, lots of fish, and lots of coral, which is what we came for.

Our next stop was David’s Place. We don’t have a lot of great things to say about it. We found the people at this place unfriendly. Basically they would only speak to their guests when it involved collecting or making money. There was a nice beach/snorkelling area which would take us 10 minutes to get to if we walked along the shore, but we could only access it at low tide. The rest of the time we were stuck at the lodge. There was no fan in the bure so it was hot at night for sleeping. The mozzies were very bad in the evening and despite a sign which read, ‘bar stays open until last guest goes to bed’ the bar would close without warning; usually very early. We have learned signs and prices on signs mean very little in Fiji. Kris met a girl (another POM) she enjoyed talking to and we met an older British couple we got along with so that helped pass the time.

I suppose that is the positive side of a three night stay – it goes by rather quickly I’d just like to add that the ladies in the kitchen were very nice and worked very hard. What it boils down to basically is, Peter who ran the place was a dick, and really created the bad Karma we felt from this place – bottom line though is, it beats the hell out of being at work and winter!

Our last stop was Wayalailai, and despite some questionable weather and stomach disruption, this place was grand and we felt extremely welcome the minute we got on their shuttle boat. Arriving on their main beach we were welcomed/seranaded by their staff playing guitars and singing.

Wayalailai Island is very picturesque and has some terrific snorkelling with crystal clear waters right out front. Their generator would only run in the evening for 5-6 hours, which never bothered us. Meals were a bit of an adventure, but generally decent and plentiful. Strangely, the bar would call out last call and close very early even though people were still drinking?! We did manage to drink a fair amount of Kava though, and the taste actually started to grow on us….

We did some snorkelling on a terrific reef (which we got to by a boat that had absolutely no safety equipment on board….although by this time we were quite used to this) and were fortunate enough to see a couple white tip reef sharks up close. We also saw a sleeping leopard shark on another snorkel adventure. We went out fishing in some pretty rough seas without much luck, but have to say being out in an open, leaky boat in rain and rough seas with an engine that keeps cutting out (and no safety equipment, remember) conjured up some visions of floating off into oblivion!

We had a terrific time at Wayalailai in every aspect, and would certainly be happy to return, and of course we were sad to leave.

The day we left to catch the big catamaran was a rough one. We loaded 10 guests, 2 crew and all our gear into the rather small boat and crossed our fingers as we crossed the rough wind lashed strait separating us from our destination. We made it….barely, and our journey back to Nadi was the antithesis of the calm sunny ride we took coming out to the islands. However, we met up again with some of the friends we had made and swapped stories of our adventures in the Yasawas, which made time fly by on the boat. So sad it’s over…

Here’s looking forward to sunnier skies and calmer seas for our journey to the island of Taveuni.

This entry was posted on Sunday, March 18th, 2007 at 6:55 am and is filed under Travel. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.