Sigatoka

Saturday we got up nice and early to make the 7:30 bus from Suva to Sigatoka. We had a couple stops on the way where pushy Indian food vendors carried trays of food up to the open windows on the bus yelling at all the passengers to buy things. I tried to nap while listening to music but the creepy Bollywood movie that the driver was blaring couldn't be drowned out, unfortunately. I got out of Suva for the first time since I got here though, and it was very nice to get to see rural Viti Levu for a bit on the drive. The area is really hilly and full of farmland and little villages all along the way, along with many beaches visible from the highway (that term is used loosely - we were on the main road between Nadi and Suva, but it was 1 lane and had speed bumps every few miles). When we got off at Sigatoka we had a few minutes to try and sort out the next bus that would take us to the hostel where we were staying, during which I was half awake at the stop and found myself next to a few large burlap sacks filled with live creatures that were thrashing around trying to get out...I'm guessing crabs? I'm hoping crabs because I don't know what else it would be. No one else seemed fazed by this so I thought I was hallucinating (again) but I'm sure they're used to stranger things than that.

We got on another bus that took us to the hostel, which was pretty much a building with a couple large rooms filled with bunk beds next to a small house. The place was run by a woman who lived with her 3 or 4 sons - it turned out that her husband was pilot that flew for Emirates in the Middle East, but died from some form of cancer a couple of years ago. It was sad, but she was extremely friendly and helpful, and her kids were happy to play with us and share their toys. After getting things sorted out and renting a couple boogie boards and surfboards from the owners, we headed out to the beach, which is framed by a long chain of sand dunes.

Walking out from the house to the dunes. The property next to ours was very large and fenced in a lot of horses and cows that had their run of the beach and some scrubby grassland by the dunes.

Another view of the dunes. These things really were pretty big, and were a mixture of white sand and black volcanic sand, so it kind of looked like salt and pepper. It also made it extremely hot and painful to walk on. Some of the locals in Suva told us that you could sled/ski down the dunes balancing on the rough leaves at the base of a palm tree, but we weren't too eager to try that out given that it would inevitably involve wiping out into rough scalding sand. Danny tried launching himself off the steep side of one on a boogie board, but the board just stuck in place and Danny went flying over the side, so I don't think that can be counted as successful.

I don't think that the beach was considered beautiful by Fiji standards, but I still thought it was nice. The waves were huge and pretty rough, so I didn't mess around with playing in surf too much. We were a little ways away from the end of the beach, which was a sandbar cut off by a river emptying out into the ocean. We talked to some local surfers that were out, who said that the river created a nasty riptide that would shoot you out past the breakers before intersecting with another current bringing you back along the beach so that you could surf in from there. Some of the boys tried messing around with this but I wasn't too keen on it. The river also carried a bunch of debris from the forests upstream, so the beach was littered with tons of weathered old tree limbs, bamboo sticks, and in some cases, whole trees. You can see some of these bits of driftwood in the picture.

The other side of the sandbar enclosed the mouth of the river, which was much calmer and much nicer to swim in. This is a view from the sandbar across the river; you can't see it, but there was a little village on the other side. I floated around on a couple of bamboo sticks for a while in the water, which was relaxing and peaceful.

We spent a long while messing around on the beach, and everything went well. Actually, Eli jumped in to surf with his camera in his pocket and lost it in the sea, and Edgar almost died getting caught in the riptide and losing his boogie board, but if you ignore those minor details it was a good day. I tried watching an episode of 30 rock on my ipod before going to bed, but since the lights were out I got swarmed with moths and other night bugs so that was a failure. It's a lot less humid out in the country than in Suva, so we were a lot more comfortable just existing in general.