It begins

We left home in the late afternoon to begin our long journey to our first major destination - Hawaii.

Preflight drinks

First stop would be Melbourne.  The flight was mostly empty so pretty much a non-event.  Oh and before I forget Tony won the packing contest.  He had packed his own and Nate’s gear in the one suitcase and it weighed less than mine still.  Dons was close to mine, but I added in extra shoes as I had room ha-ha.  Hand luggage was another story – Don had to remove a couple of kilos at Melbourne as his carry on was too fat.

Adelaide to Melbourne

Nate the luggage man

The flight from Melbourne to Nadi was just under 5 hours and again the plane had lots of free seats.  We lucked out when checking in and scored a helpful chickie that moved Tony and Don to the exit row and Nate and I sat in the row in front of them.  The positives were that Tony and Don got to stretch their legs and Nate and I got a row to ourselves; the negative, that we later agreed upon to outweigh the plus was that the seats didn't recline so we only got the bare minimum of sleep.

Fiji is quite beautiful and when we landed the sun was just starting to show her reddened face.  The airport is bordered by a gorgeous mountain range so quite a view already.  Once inside the airport there was a little band to serenade the incoming passengers which was a nice touch – finally I felt like the holiday was beginning. 

Nadi airport

The hotel in Fiji was nice, pretty basic but could not beat the location - literally across the road from the airport.  Nate and I walked back to the airport to buy lunch and it maybe took 4 minutes by foot. Continental breakfast started our day followed by a couple of hours sleep before hitting the pool.  Tony and Don tried the premium Fiji beer – not impressed.

Nate the superfish

Not so premium

We had dinner in the little hotel restaurant and Im not sure if it was just that we were tired and hungry but the food was amazing - the highlight for me was the banana fritter for desert (the coconut icecream was just as good).  More Fijian music to serenade us and a visit from many little frogs that seemed to be having a convention on the lawn.

Fijian BBQ chookie

Coconut icecream

Banana fritters with booby icecream

Ribbit

We booked out at 9:30 pm and took the free shuttle back to the airport to catch our next flight onto Hawaii.  Must say that Fijians seem to be a laid back and airport check in was pretty bad.  Supposed to start at 10 pm so we were lucky that we were early in the queue.  At 10 one counter opened to serve the 'business class' passengers.  About 5 minutes after that another person rocked up and yep, she too was serving the business class / Tabua club passengers.  We had a Russian man in the queue behind us who obviously had had one too many Vodkas and was starting to get toey.  We thought he was going to go off when the next attendant turned up because it looked like he was not going to serve the economy peeps either.  All in all it took 45 minutes for a process that really should have been a few minutes.

 

We still had a long wait in the airport because our plane didn't take off until 0100 am!!  Cant say how tired we were by the time we boarded the plane finally.