Yasawas: Naviti

After my second exam on Friday, I rushed to pack up some things and then got a minibus with a couple of friends to spend the night at a backpackers in Nadi. Despite the Celtics losing and staying awake for the terrible joke that was the Germany game, I was still excited, because we were heading out the next morning to go to an island in the Yasawa island chain to the northwest of the mainland.

These islands are extremely touristy, and swarming with British gap-year students (who I've grown to be very annoyed with since they come all the way to Fiji and spend a few months lazing around and drinking rather than doing anything). They're a lot like the Mamanucas, with sort of a staged effort to try to make it seem like an authentic experience. I might have been okay with this and enjoyed it at the beginning of the semester, but at this point I just get annoyed. Enough negativity! The island was very beautiful and relaxing, and it was a great way t break up the weekend between exams.

We did a dive there that was really cool: there were tons of sea fans, feather starfish, a few sharks, big schools of colorful fish and even a couple of nudibranchs. The dive instructor got really excited when we told him we were from Suva, since he lives in a town nearby. He complained about how much he didn't like living on the islands, and how he was excited to head back to Suva next week and wanted to get in touch with us so we could meet up before we left. The dive was a little bit of a mess - there were 2 French kids with us who didn't speak much English and didn't really know what was going on, took forever to get down to the bottom, and we had to cut the dive short because one of them actually ran out of air (how are you not looking at your gauge for something important like that?). We still had fun though, and passed out early in the night to catch up on sleep that has been neglected during exams and traveling.

The next morning, we studied for an exam on Monday a decent amount while waiting for our boat transfer back to the mainland. This is the view from my study spot. I think it beats staring at the walls in Schow back home at Williams. We grabbed pizza at a great place in Nadi once we got back, then had another minibus ride all the way back to Suva, where we promptly passed out. It was a busy and travel-filled weekend, but I'm still glad that we got out to the Yasawas before I left. As touristy as it is, it's very beautiful, and I'm sad that I missed out on some of the cool things there (swim through caves, manta ray snorkeling, stuff like that). I've still gotten the opportunity to see and do a lot of great things since I've been in Fiji though, so I can't focus on the things that I didn't get around to...