G’Day Mate

Our last week in Fiji was spent hopping around the Yasawa Island chain, land of the 18 year old English backpacker. These islands are what you see in ads selling Fiji as a great tourist destination, beautiful blue and green water, tiny islands with tiny villages, coral reefs galore. They are also some of the more expensive places to visit since resorts are your only option and most include an overpriced compulsory meal plan. We’re still trying to figure out how these kids are traveling on these very expensive package tours through Australia, New Zealand, and Fiji. There are a ton of activities available and we took advantage of some great snorkeling with friendly reef sharks, squid, and giant clams, line fishing (we both caught barracuda), and cave exploration. John even got to “jam” with the locals at one resort after he had tuned all of their guitars for them. The resorts all provide nightly entertainment and usually all of the staff knows how to sing or play guitar. They ALL sing the same farewell song though, and after hearing it every day for a week, we were not sad to leave that song behind us. Actually, we probably only heard about 20 different songs the entire time we were in Fiji. We think there is one CD that everyone in Fiji owns and it’s played at all of the resorts, on public transportation, on the radio stations, etc. The radio also overplays a small selection of truly terrible pop music. John would usually have to “cleanse” his ears with his iPod after any public outing.

We have since moved on to the land of Oz. We met up with some friends in Brisbane (Shosh from St. Mary’s and David who we had met in Fiji) and took a couple days to get over the shockingly high prices in Australia. For realz, cheap nasty beer costs $5-7 each at a bar and about $14 for a 6 pack in a bottle shop, gas is about $6/gallon, crappy dorm beds about $30, and the Lonely Planet guide for Thailand costs $50! Luckily, there are many used book stores around but we’re refraining from beer these days and trying hard to get north where it’s warm enough to camp. We have always imagined that winter in Australia was kind of mild (more of a “relative” coldness) but it’s been dang nippy since we arrived getting down into the 40s at night. It even snowed in Sydney a couple days ago. Our wildlife spotting has been pretty limited so far…one live kangaroo on the side of the road, about 15 dead ones. It doesn’t look like they’re too good at crossing the road. We’ve also discovered that free wireless internet in Australia is something that only exists in our imagination so we’ve been forced to actually (gasp) pay for internet access to upload our pics. So here ya go, the rest of our Fiji pics are now posted.

We have a local phone number now also.  If you want to call us from the US, dial 011 617 0405 639 558.  From Australia, it’s just 0405 639 558 (city code 07).

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