We made it! 10 days of fantastic diving. I'll write more about that in my next posts after we get back home to Florida. For a review of the trip written by the leaders, Josh and Liz, you can read the Divemaster diary .

We got off the ship yesterday and took the 3 hour bus drive to the south side of the main island, to a town called Pacific Harbour. We had reservations for a whitewater rafting trip on the Upper Navua River with Rivers Fiji. After checking into the hotel, we checked in with Rivers Fiji and were told that the river trip was cancelled. :-( Apparently a truck carrying a heavy load of gravel broke thru a bridge on the road to the river. The bridge was supposed to be fixed this past Monday, but, now the word is maybe it'll be fixed by Friday. Our flight out is on Thursday, so we won't make it.

We're staying at a hotel called the Pearl. Don't you feel sorry for us that we have to hang out here for a couple days?





I was perusing the hotel information notebook and discovered that there was an ethernet cable connection to the Internet. I plugged it in and, voila! I was on the Internet. It appeared to be free, no price listed anywhare. I was thinking about doing a bunch of Blogging with our free time here today, but I decided to ask the front desk about any possible charges, since, even at $260/night, nothing seems to be included! Sure enough, it's $1.10 per megabyte. I was told that I'd already accrued $7 of charges. So ... I'm going to make this short!

The Rivers Fiji folks have made arrangements for us to tag along on the ride up to another river trip tomorrow. I hope we don't regret agreeing to ride for 6 hours in a truck to the inland of Fiji. It's supposed to be beautiful, and it sounds like a great compromise when we don't have enough time to do the actual river rafting, but we want to see some of wild Fiji.

I'm not sure what date and time this will show as being posted. So, thought I'd mention that it's 6:30pm on 5/24 here. We'll start our eastward travels tomorrow night.

eh .. matha (that's Fijian, I think for it's finished)

Well it's 6:30pm MDT on 5/24/06 that I'm responding to you...NAW...I don't feel a BIT sorry that you have to hang out in S-H-A-N-G-R-I-L-A for a couple days. Lookin' forward to hearing from you when you get back where the internet is reasonably priced!!!

Hey John ... yeah - it wasn't so bad hanging out there! We were disappointed in not paddling the river, but we did get to go on the bus into the highlands ... I should have some great pictures from there, it was magnificent. Sitting in LAX right now. One of our dive buddies was on our same flight and he invited us to the Admiral's club for our 8 hr layover. Free Internet workstations! Pretty cool.

Your site is on top of my favourites - Great work I like it.
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