24TH MAY - 6TH JUNE

We had an extremely bumpy flight from Auckland which was slightly unnerving at times. It was an absolutely stinking day when we left and Auckland was under a mass of grey clouds which were depositing their contents of rain all over the city. We figured that the transition between cold and warm air was responsible for the extreme turbulence that we experienced. The food was delayed for quite some time due to the fasten your seatbelts sign being permanently on and therefore the following cabin service was somewhat chaotic! This turned out to be very unfortunate for Rob as they had run out of seafood meals by the time they got to him, which meant he just had to eat the bits he could out of the chicken curry meal! After a little more turbulence coming in to Fiji, we were quite relieved when the wheels finally touched down on Fijian soil.

We had already pre-booked a

nights accommodation to avoid any hassle and this also meant that we had a free shuttle ride to our hostel. The airport is a pretty slick operation, everything is very organised and before you know it you’re whisked to the correct area for collection! This is of course after passing the resident airport band who serenade you while going through immigration!

Sure enough our pick up arrived and it took about 10 minutes to get to Horizon Beach Resort, the hostel we had chosen. The hostel was fine, nothing fancy but it was clean and all of the staff were extremely friendly and helpful. We were in time for the happy hour so we figured that we would calm our nerves after the up and downs of the flight and have our first taste of Fiji Gold - wow what a relief, nice beer!!! It was a vast improvement on New Zealand’s beer effort, we weren’t quite sure if this would be a good thing or not! Lazy days on