Day 18 - 4th Mar 2009

Today we had planned to go to the local town Nadi and have a look round the shops there. So got up at a much more lesiurely 8:30 and went down for breakfast. While waiting for our breakfast to arrive I decided to ask the front desk what time the buses were into town. I was told that there was one in 5 minutes and then the next one was at 11:30. Well 5 minutes was no good as we wanted to eat breakfast and 11:30 seemed a long time to wait to start our day. So I asked how long it would take to walk, the lady at the desk looked a bit dubious at this idea and seemed to want me to take a taxi, but said it would take about an hour to walk depending on how fast we walked. Well an hour seemd ok to us, it wasn't quite upto 30 degrees celcius out yet and we'd take plenty of water. So after finishing breakfast we set off on our walk. Like the other evening we had about 5 different offers of taxis within the first few hundred meters (some licenced cabs, some not) I'm not sure people could actually believe that we wanted to walk. The last unlicensed cab even tried to tell us that it wasn't safe to walk, in order to get our business, but we carried on. A little further up the road the free airport shuttle from our hostel pulled up and asked us where we were walking and when we told them, offered us a lift to the main road. This we gratefully excepted as it almost halved our distance. I think the pickup drivers thought we were a bit crazy to want to walk and said the journey would be "interesting" and also warned us to watch out for touts trying to get us into their businesses. So after they dropped us off at the mainroad we continued our walk and it was fine. Intereesting was probably the right description for it, there wasn't really much of a pavement for a lot of the journey and where they had roadworks there was no allowance made for pedestrians at all, but we made it to Nadi fine and you get to see much more of the local surroundings on foot.

Nadi is an interesting town and quite difficult to describe. The best concise description I could come up with is that it is trying to be a touristy town but doesn't really have mnay tourists. When we arrived it was really quite busy, but we seemed to be the only tourists around, everyone else was either of Fijiian or Indian descent. As a result all the owners of the tourist souvenior shops wanted us (seeming the only 2 tourists in the whole town) in their shops. We soon met the touts that the pickup driver had mentioned. I think they must have all learned at the same tout school as they all seemed to have a very similar technique: They were friendly enough and greeted you with a Bula (hello in Fijiian which is common enough everywhere), then it was "Where are you from?", "England" we'd reply, (At this point the instructor must have said make sure you shake their hands so they have to stop) "Ah" they say "the motherland", and then the instuctor must have said improvise a little, and we got a quick snippet of why they liked England, ranging from "they had a friend there" to "it's great because of colonisation we're not canibals anymore!". Then it was back to the script and "you don't want to buy anything from all these shops on the mainroad, they're all run by Indian's, you need to come to my shop down this side road or up these stairs". We politley declinded their offers and to be fair they weren't too pushy. It just got a little tiresome playing this script out with various different people as we made our way up the street.

We eventually made it to a little outdoor handicraft market at which we had fun bartering for various necklaces and bracelets. We seemed to get some good deals, maybe due to the lack of customers. We then carried on down to the end of the town and had a look at the Hindu temple there. We then returned to a cafe for lunch, before catching a taxi back to our hostel (by this time the midday sun was out and we decided it was too hot for walking). Like so many foreign taxi drivers he refused to turn his meter on, but the 7 dollar fare we agreed seemd reasonable enough to us.

Spent the afternoon relaxing around our hostel. I went for a run along the beach, while Liz paddled, but found it hard work in the heat so didn't go very far.

Had dinner at the hostel, where I had some local fish which was very tasty.