Suva
Trip Start
Nov 16, 2011
1
11
75
Trip End
Jul 28, 2012
Where I stayed
Suva, Central, Fiji
Monday, December 19, 2011
Suva
We arrived in Suva a couple of hours after leaving the coral coast and realised very quickly that our hostel was on the outskirts of the city centre. We caught a taxi to the rain tree lodge and when we realised how far away it was we knew we had made the right choice. The hostel was set in the middle of the rain-forest; a 5 minute walk down the road was a national park, so we headed to find a waterfall that we had been told about. The walk to the waterfall took about 1.5 hours along uneven and narrow footpaths along the way there were a number of smaller waterfalls along the way which were pretty cool. When we finally reached the last pool, we found a large number of locals all queuing up to use one of the largest rope swings I have ever seen. Watched a few of these crazy people jump off of the rope swing before taking the shorter route back to the hostel (this still took nearly an hour).
When we arrived back at the hostel we sat on our balcony overlooking the lake and watched the damselfly's hovering over the Lilly pads and tried to spot parrots in the treetops I'm glad no one else was around as we would have smelt pretty bad after walking through the rain-forest in 35 degree+ heat!
The next day we caught the local bus into the city centre to have a look round and see what was going on, the bus ride was great, it cost $1 (30p) the seats were wide and comfortable, plenty of leg room, and as soon as we sat down one of the locals started talking to us, making sure we had been charged the right amount and telling us about his family, just a genuinely nice person.
After getting off the bus we walked around and found that Suva was much like any other capital city, busy, dirty and everyone was in a rush to get somewhere not what we had come to expect of Fijians. After looking around the shops and along the waterfront (the second largest natural harbour in the world). We headed back up into the rain-forest, and sat around the pool in the hostel for the rest of the afternoon.
Suva was not that nice because it was obvious we were tourists so every shop tried to drag us in their shops and people on the street would try and con you but it was so hard to figure out who these people were as all the locals wanted to speak to us too. One guy told us not to buy things off
the street then once he found out our name he was going to try and engrave our name onto a wooden dagger and then say we had asked him too…luckily other locals had warned us of this and we knew as soon as he reached into his bag what he was doing so we said NO and walked away.
As we left Suva on the way back to Nadi, the weather took a turn and it rained constantly for the entire journey, the local villages and towns that we passed through didn’t seem to mind that everything around them was under water, they (especially the kids)were just having fun playing volleyball and rugby.
