We spent many hours during the first three months of this cruising season on the east side of Fiji documenting the beautiful, strong faces of our friends in Fulunga. These faces have so much character and speak to a life most of us have never dreamed of. Their faces tell of the hard work that subsistence living is. And they tell of the fun and laughter that can be shared by all ages. We love these faces.

Now, as the season winds down, we’ve been in a different kind of place. We have spent the last few weeks enjoying the Yasawas on the west side of Fiji.. The Yasawas are the tourist destination that most people experience when they visit Fiji. There are soft sand beaches lined with coconut palms in beautiful cool lagoons. And there are resorts. That’s a face of Fiji we had not really encountered this year. But an evening on a sand beach with fancy cocktails as we watch the sun slip into the ocean behind Charisma has some charm to it also. Just very different.

And today we encountered another face of Fiji. This one is the face that gets the tourists to and from Fiji. We motored back from the Yasawas starting bright and early this morning with anchors up at 6 AM. Ouch. But the timing was perfect in retrospect. As we left Liku Liku Bay, dark rain clouds were rolling that way. They missed us. As we got in sight of the big island of Viti Levu rain clouds headed toward us and veered off. Spared again. A giant sea turtle floated by unbothered by our engine noise. And we dropped anchor at noon in a bay just off the airport.

The airport is very busy. International jets, small island hoppers, helicopters and seaplanes are buzzing over head. I guess the tourists that don’t sail have to get here somehow. And to get into this bay we passed by several large freighters waiting to pull into Lautoka to offload their cargo. Yep, it’s the transportation face of Fiji.

Rumor has it that there is a pub in the two story building on shore. With Orcinius we are going to brave a whole new world and check it out for dinner. I bet we will meet some friendly faces.

Today marks our last “pure” day of cruising in Fiji. Tomorrow we leave Liku Liku Bay on Waya (also known as Octopus Resort) for Denarau, where we’ll start to prepare for departure to New Zealand.

This has been a pretty fun place even though we’ve had to go back and forth from this side of the island to the other about four times in the last five days as the wind has changed back and forth and left us each time on an uncomfortable lee shore. But…in the mean time we’ve been able to dive some of the great coral reefs here four times, including one last dive today. Fantastic, clear water and healthy coral. Just beautiful.

So…tomorrow we wake up at 0530 for “anchors up” at 0600. We’ll be heading back to Denarau with our friends Orcinius. Actually we’re still going to “wind down” a bit by anchoring at a little village they know of that’s two miles from Denarau for the weekend. John says it has a pub so maybe not so “little” nor “village” but anyway, it sounds nice and it will give us a last day or two to savor the weather and friendship before entering the marina environment at Denarau where Orcinius will work on decommissioning for the cyclone season, since they are staying here, and Charisma will be doing boatwork and shopping/provisioning to prepare for the 1200 mile trip back to New Zealand where we’ll spend the cyclone season. Why the difference in strategies? Orcinius might be going further west into Indonesia and Charisma will be going east back to the west coast of the US. So they want to be closer to Indonesia and we need the option to either go due east from NZ down in the southern hemisphere or possibly head back up this way and then work our way east. We’re still doing more research on which route we would rather take. Basically we’re looking for favorable winds, current and seas. None of our choices are as easy as coming down here. We’ll be very weather dependent the whole way back. More about that later.

In the mean time, we should have internet again in a day or so and will try to post some more pictures. Then stay tuned in the next few weeks for blogs on our voyage back down to NZ. It’s always somewhat of an adventure although we try for it not to be. 😉