Sydney Life

don’t know if any of you guys have noticed, but it’s bloody freezing.
It’s so cold in Sydney right now that I’m keeping my freezer door open in the hope that it will heat up the house a little. I have to type this entry with my chattering teeth for fear of losing my fingers if I remove them from my pockets. I’ve lost my sense of smell, not because I have a head cold but because my nose has frozen off.

Ok, so maybe I’m catastrophising little, but I’ve just come back from Fiji, where it only gets nippy when there’s a Great White around. Thankfully it seems the sharks were on holidays too for the time I was there, so my two friends and I were able to enjoy our fun in the sun relatively uninterrupted. If you’ve just spent the last two weeks in Sydney, I’m sure you’d like to hear about a warm weather getaway on a student budget, so that maybe you won’t make the same mistake next winter break. So here is what I did.

My two friends and I decided it would be nice to go somewhere hot for the uni holidays. Realizing it would cost $3000 to get to Greece on the airfare alone, we went to a travel agent and decided on Fiji. It was only $1200, which although not cheap, was only that much because we booked a month before leaving. If you book further in advance you can get deals for as low as $500. The three of us decided on a two week, “Full Monty” package which included all accommodation, food and activities included, for a further $1050. It sounds like a lot I know, but it works out to $75 a day, and the only additional cost on the tour was alcohol, which if bought duty free at the airport is also very cheap. If you work a part time job for about three months and just put a little away every now and then you’ll have enough easily.

The tour consisted of an island hop across five islands in a remote but relatively easy to get to part of Fiji called the Yasawa Islands. We arrived on the mainland, stayed overnight and were transferred early next morning onto a double hulled jet boat called the Yasawa Flyer. From there we were ferried from each island by tenders. Unfortunately they were far from tender with our bags. On most islands we would stay for two nights, and on one of the nights we stayed on board a cruise boat. We would meet new ( and sometimes the same) people every night because the tours all begin and end randomly depending on when you book it and which package you’ve booked. If someone booked their tour to start the day after you, you’d run into them every second day. My friends and I were always together though, because we were all on the same tour at the same time.

It would take too long to give a detailed description of the trip, but here are some of the highlights and lowlights:

Highlights:
• Swimming, snorkeling and kayaking.
• Fish and ( if you’re game) feeding small reef sharks
• Guided hikes
• Cave diving in Sawailau (the place where they shot the Blue Lagoon with Brooke Shields )
• The “Seaspray adventure cruise”, a full day of sailing with all alcohol, food and snorkeling included.
• The “Wana Taki” cruise, a live-aboard cruise complete with a hot shower, dvds, outrageous night games and a 3m drop from the boat into the water.
• “Queenie”, the flamboyantly gay Host(ess) of Sunrise Lagoon Resort and his hilarious lip-syncing of stupid songs.
• The constant friendly “Bula”, meaning hello as well as a whole lot of other things, from almost every Fijian.
• The two nights on Beachcomber island, the party island, where all-nighters, toga parties and table dancing are common and the buffet lunches and dinners are great.

Lowlights:
• Only the “Wana Taki” has a warm shower. All the other showers are mostly just raised taps.
• At some of the places, what you see is what you get in terms of food, but I’m a pretty fussy eater and I found it all edible.
• On a lot of the islands the water isn’t good to drink so you have to buy it and it’s pretty expensive at $3.50 per bottle.
• You have to keep moving all the time and by the end you get pretty tired, but there’s always a hammock nearby!

I would definitely recommend it for next winter, it’s run by a company called Awesome Adventures Fiji, but book it all early to get cheap flights as well!

Bula!