Leleuvia

This weekend a small group of us went to Leleuvia, a small island in the Lomoviti group. It's right by Cagalai (in fact you can see it) and was very similar: beautiful little island with not that many people. This place had a couple of sandy outbreaks that were better for swimming, but didn't have good snorkeling right nearby.

Eli doing a backflip as the tide came in. We're in sandy swimming area - at low tide, it was just a big sandy oval that stuck out in the sea. On Sunday we just hung out sitting on the flat sand as the tide came in slowly.

A really cool looking crab. At low tide there were a lot of fat crabs just hanging out in the rocks out by the water, and they were too lazy to run away. This one was green on top with bright orange on its leg joints and purple claws.

A coconut crab! We saw this one when we hiked through the middle of the island (it took about five minutes to get to the other side). They look like giant (about the size of your fist) hermit crabs that use a small nut shell as their protection.

Sweet palm tree going over the water. Nichole and I laid out on it and tanned while the boys explored the water. It's probably the best tanning bed I've had at this point.

One of the little boats used to move luggage and people from the boat landing at Bau (by Nausori, where the airport closest to Suva is) to the island.

Eli climbing up a big dead tree that was washed up in the tidal flats. There was one side of the island that had a handful of giant dead tree stumps and limbs washed up - probably from the mainland when a cyclone came through.

It was gorgeous the first day, and we laid around and tanned and explored the island. At night we had dinner and then sat around drinking for a little while, heading out to a bonfire where we hung out and looked at the stars. In the morning we got up - Will and I wanted to go diving, but the guy that ran the dive shop was still sleeping - and wandered around some more. I did a lot of beachcombing and found a ton of sweet shells, half of which I had to bring back because it turned out that they had tiny hermit crabs that got ambitious and decided to live in a shell far too large for their body size. I also saw a cone snail shell! There wasn't a cone snail in it (a hermit crab had commandeered it) but it was still really cool since it looked a bit like stained glass. I'm doing a report on cone snail poisons for my marine biology class so I was really excited.

On the way back, I sat next to an Australian woman on the boat who was the only vet at the humane society in Suva! She was really cool and we talked about vet stuff for a while - I was pumped since I haven't met anyone yet that understands vet stuff. When we got back to the landing our taxi wasn't there, and she got all of her friends to help out and give us rides back to Suva, which was great.

We're all realizing that we only have a little over a month left here, and we're starting to freak out about getting to see everything that we want to before we leave. I can't even start to think about leaving here yet. It's weird with my friends from home that are already back, I feel like I'm missing out on happy reunions and a lot of other stuff at home. But I get scared when I think about it. I find myself having nightmares about leaving, and a lot of other people have the same problem. A couple of times I dream that I'm back at home, and I wake up relieved that I'm still here. It's very strange. For now though, we're going to focus on planning trips out and getting to everywhere we want to go. Some work needs to get done this week so that I can get out for our last actual weekend there.