A Tennessee Girl in Oz: Bula from Fiji!

As I learned today, "bula" means hello in Fiji. Which is where we are!

About six months ago, T told me to block off my long Easter weekend and to take a couple extra days of holiday - he had a trip planned for us. He managed to keep our destination secret all the time since, finally telling me the Wedneday before we left that he'd booked us a trip to a Fiji island! As you would imagine, I was beyond excited!!! This is the kind of exotic trip I told myself we'd take all the time once we lived in Australia, but this is the first true "island vacation" for us. I'm a pretty lucky girl!

T had arranged everything for us, which was no small feat. We were headed to Nukubati, a private island on the north side of the country. To get there, we had a wee bit of travel: plane ride from Sydney to Nadi, from Nadi to Suva, and from Suva to Labasa. From there, we took an SUV ride to the coast, and then a boat out to the island. Needless to say, it's enough to make a girl feel like a glamorous criminal on the run.

The travel itself was so fun, though. Leaving Sydney was pretty much like any other flight, but once we arrived in Nadi, all normalcy was gone. The airport was tiny, and looked just like you'd expect a tropical airport to look: laid back workers in tropical shirts, giant fans in place of air conditioning, and one tiny Western Union stall for exchanging currency.

A snack at the single cafe

As we transferred to our domestic flight, we got to watch the airport staff put a man on the luggage scales for "airplane balancing" purposes. Luckily, they didn't deem Toby or I high-risks for plane unbalancing!

Our flight lounge

As it would happen, Nadi was the "big" airport of the day. Suva was incredibly small:

Everyone lined up for the one flight leaving Suva

And Labasa was even smaller. We had to get our bags at Labasa, which was an adventure in itself. We deboarded the plane and walked across the tarmac to the tiny building which was the airport. There were about 70 people in it, all just standing and staring at us when we walked in, which was a little unnerving. Since you could see the entire room, it was pretty clear to us that there were no "baggage claim" signs. In fact, the only signs we saw were "Police" and "Gents Toilets." We decided to just mill around for a moment and see what we could figure out.

That turned out to be a good plan, because within five minutes, a man came in the same door we'd entered, pulling a giant luggage cart behind him. And then it was a free for all to get your suitcase off the cart.

Our two suitcases were the absolutely last two to get taken, completely due to the fact that we were so stunned at the fray, everything was over by the time we wrestled our way to the cart. Which turned out OK, because it was probably our look of being completely out of place that led our driver to come up to us and say "Nukubati Island?" I'm not sure how we would have found each other otherwise, because he certainly didn't have a sign or uniform! But after we said yes, he cheerfully said, "I wait for you outside." All that was left for us to do was fight our way to our bags, locate our new friend out in the parking lot, and we were off on our next-to-final leg of the journey!

We quickly realized that we were in a more laid-back world, when our driver friend made two stops without any explanation at all. Once was to buy water (which he shared with us) and once to drop off a container of gasoline at a house in the middle of a field. Both times he stopped the car, got out and walked away without a word. But he did come back, and we eventually bounced our way to the coast, where our final leg awaited us.

This was by far the best of our modes of transport! It was just a tiny boat with an outboard motor and a cheerful man taking us on the five minute ride to the island. It was a pretty amazing way to end our day of travel.