Fiji

Nadi, Mana Island, Beachcomber Island
Friday 5th - Tuesday 9th September
So our flight from LA made time and took 10.5 hours rather than 12 and we arrived in Nadi airport at 5.30am. We arrived in our hostel around 7, which was actually on the beach!! Needless to say we spent the whole day relaxing, lying around in a hammock in the sunshine, napping and reading. We did manage to do something productive however, and booked ourselves a trip for the following couple of days to take us to some of the smaller islands.
We left the next day around 10am on a small boat. We had packed our backpacks for the next two days and were ready to go! The boat stopped off at a small private island called Funky Fish, and we got to have a look around. Eventually we arrived at our first official stop, Mana Island.  We had some lovely lunch there before taking a walk along one side of the island stopping for a swim in the sea along the way (it was like a hot bath in places!!) It looked like a very tropical island as there was a lot of palm trees and bushes alongside the beach! Eventually we came back to the beach by our room (and had another nap.) We had dinner, and watched a traditional fijan dancing performance followed by the fire show on the beach. We ended up making friends with people from the hostel and had a really fun night dancing and playing games and even having a little sing along to someones guitar.
The next day our boat came to pick us up and took us to our next stop, Beachcomber Island.  This was a tiny little island, which literally took 15 minutes to walk right the way around.  It was supposedly supposed to be the "party island" but it was really empty and probably had no more than 40 people on it all together. It was so beautiful and was very different to our previous stop and so it was still very much worth the trip! We had traditional fijan food here, which was lots of root vegetables (one tasted like a palm tree and ended up left on my plate) but there was lots of fresh fish and
I tried a cold coconut fish type soup which was different. Our room was so cool. It was a big dormitory, with no real walls on the outside as the windows were huge, with a bamboo and straw roof. I woke up really early the next day as the sun was shining in, so i got up to see the sun was still low in the sky and the beach looked amazing! I ended up skyping emma (& caught gran breifly too) to catch up and also to show her the beach. LAter after a choppy boat ride back we arrived back at our hostel in nadi.  Some friends we met on Mana island ended up being in our hostel there so that night we sat up playing card games with them which was really funny!
The next day we had to leave for the airport around 1, and our flight to Sydney was at 3.30pm.
Overall Fiji was a brilliant choice to stop over on our way to Australia, the perfect mix of relaxing and travelling, but we could easily have spent a lot longer there trying to see more of the islands!!!!