Honeymoon in Fiji

We finally landed at Nadi airport Fiji, and the first thing that hit us was the heat, and this was at about 6:30am in the morning!
We collected our bags and after a fairly hefty wait to get through customs we grabbed a cab, stopped in at a local supermarket and grabbed a few beers etc, and then headed for Port Denarau where we had a big boat waiting to take us out to our resort.

After hopping on the boat and deciding it was a good idea to sit in the sun for the entire length of the 4 hour journey, we made it to our resort after stopping at about 12 other resorts along the way to pick up and drop off other passengers.

We arrived at Botaira Resort at around 12pm after hopping on a smaller boat which ferried us to the shore. We were greeted by some of the locals who worked at the resort who were playing guitars and the ukelele and singing Fijian songs. (nice touch!)

During our stay at the resort we went for about an hour hike over the mountain to a local village, and visited the church and school and met the locals which was amazing to see who differently they lived! For instance, the town was without electricity so the locals generally shared a generator between 2 houses to get their power!

Another day we did a trip out to a nice coral reef and got into a bit of snorkelling in the shallow water, which we loved so much we then went snorkelling nearly twice a day for the rest of our stay.

The good thing about this was there was also a fantastic coral reef just offshore from our resort, so we got to check out all the different types of coral formations, as well as probably around 100 different varieties of tropical fish, which were not particular stressed even though we were pretty much within arms length of them the entire time.

The rest of our stay was mainly spent being lazing the days away on the beach which was a good 5 metres from our room, or working on perfecting our hammock techniques from the many trees they were hanging from... ahhh.. it was so good.

We also happened to be quite entertained by the local wildlife on the beach, mainly consisting of little sand coloured crabs scooting around everywhere, and then seeing hundreds of tiny hermit crabs plodding about the beach in all assortments of shells they've made into their home on legs.

In the evenings we'd amble on down to the beachside bar they had setup, and sampled many of the cocktails they had on offer while we waited for our dinner to be served. Hard life indeed!

Our time was finally up at our resort, and we were then taken back out to the larger boat which was heading back to the main island.

We spent one more night at a hotel close to the airport, and then got an early flight the next day to Auckland, where we spent several hours doing laps of the airport while we waited for our flight to Santiago, Chile!

Even though we were completely jet lagged when we landed in Santiago, we did find it quite amusing that although the flight took around 11 hours, we still managed to get into Santiago 4 hours earlier than when we left. Needless to say it took a few days to get the body clock sorted out!