Oh and the electricity is turned off for most of the day and my laptop only has 23 more minutes of life in it's battery.
Alrighty on to my vacation -- I had a fantastic 9 hour lay over in LAX... under most circumstances, 9 hours in a metropolitan airport might be frustrating and frankly down right annoying.... but luckily my amazing friend Paige lives there with her husband, Paul. She picked me up, we shopped for reef booties (Chicago only has one shop and no booties) and had sushi and then I made my way to the airport.
On the plane they served... you guessed it... fiji water! my favorite! It was a 10.5 hr plane ride that went by in the blink of an eye! As most of you know I'm not one of those people who take medicine for anything ... but on a ten hour plane ride I am more than happy to pop a sleeping pill to knock me the heck out. Luckily there was no one in the middle seat, but there was some very friendly, talkative Australian guy who was interested in chatting about everything. Apparently he didn't get the hint once I put my eye mask on and retainer in. Yes, I still wear my retainer. Here I am speaking with a lisp, peeking out from under my eye thingy and he just kept on talking.
I figured he'd just shut up once I put my mp3 player on and cuddled up against the window. In the middle of the night I felt my feet get really cold and wet... His glass of water was on the middle seat's tray and I guess it somehow dumped itself over... (those who know me know not to wake me up in the middle of a deep slumber... bad idea.) Even worse to dump cold water on my feet and apologize that ... "oh, it's only a little water." Yea, maybe "only a little water" for you, but now my feet are freezing. The only thing that came out of my mouth was "it's not a little water... my feet are soaking wet. thanks for waking me." haha.
Anyhoo, thanks to the sleeping pill I quickly went back to sleep and woke up ten minutes before landing. Here's the guy who picked me up at the airport at 5am:WHY is he wearing a ski jacket and winter hat???? We're in FIJI darnit! I didn't check the weather before leaving because I assumed since it was a tropical location that the weather would be piping hot. um, no, I was freaking FREEEEZING.
We drove about two hours through sugar cane fields and came across a cane train -- check this out... tons of sugar cane getting pulled by a little engine that could.
(I have to interject for a moment.... I'm sitting in the little lodge and mosquitos are eating the crap out of my legs. I already have one bite on my forhead, one on each cheek (my face, gutter minds), 27-50 on my legs and arms. seriously... I didn't even think to bring bug repellant. Some traveller I am!)
Okay, back to my story..... After the 2 hr bumpy van ride, where I slept in the back-back for about an hour.. we made it to a wharf where I got a private boat ride to my island, Nananu-I-Ra. The translation is "a place to remember", cool, huh?Here's the boat that took me to the island:
Within an hour of arriving on the island I was on a boat heading out to "kite point" to get some kite lessons.
None of the pictures I have will do this site justice, so I'll do my best to describe the area. A small yellow wooden boat took us out ten minutes from our beach to an area between two islands with a long sandbar. The end. love the detail, huh? No, just kidding. The water is crystal clear.. kind of turqouisey-blueish and since the wind is blowing about 25 knots, there are little white caps forming. Palm trees swaying in the wind and a ton of other very tropical, lush, green plants and trees lining the beach we launched off of. Definitely paradise and what you'd imagine Fiji to look like.
shooot... the boat is going out in 5 minutes and I have to untangle my lines so I can do some more kite surfing lessons..............
will finish later.
