Military Coup, Schmoo

We have a couple of other things we've been meaning to tell you about Fiji. The papers here in NZ talk regularly about its strained relationship with Fiji. In December, Fiji went through a military coup where the then-current government was thrown out. NZ issued a travel warning to its citizens which hurt Fiji's tourism. Recently a NZ minister was asked to leave Fiji which just fuels the fire more. Anyway, we experienced none of this. We only spent one night in a major city, Nadi, the night before we left. Pollution was very bad and taxi drivers hinted for a lot of tips, but otherwise it was fine. We saw no military presence at all.

The people of Waya island were incredible! The staff was very friendly. The manager, Chris and his wife Kylie, who are from Australia, were very helpful. Also, they had two kids, Charlie (4) and Paddy (2 or 3), who provided endless entertainment. Morover, the villagers welcomed us into their surroundings. The children were very friendly and inquisitive, though we had limited interaction with them since they stayed mostly in the village. Here is a picture of them loading up into the resort's boat as they do every Sunday to spend the week at school farther down the island. We gave an offering at the church, some money for the choir to travel to their tournament in Suva on the main island, and a small donation to scholarships to help pay for the children's school boarding. Some of these people had so little, yet seemed to enjoy life so much. We wish now we had given more.

Finally, our here is a picture of us with our dive instructer Asaba (sp?). He was awesome and began each of our dives by saying, with a heavy Fijian accent, "Let's take this one on Fijian time, nice and slow."