Fiji- Mana Island a wash out!

Mana Island; beautiful when it's sunny, pity we didn't see to much of it!





Unfortunately we arrived late in Nadi Fiji, not getting the best choice in accommodation however we found a room and from there arranged an all inclusive three day trip to ‘Mana Island’ leaving the next morning.

Great in theory except that it rained most of the time and the ‘resort’ was crap; terrible food and bad ‘backpacker’ accommodation. However the island was quite nice, tiny, and between the rain we walked through to the other side (10 minutes walk) to where they filmed the fourth series of Survivor- Mana. They left all the huts and props after them and while it’s a small tourist attract its dilapidated and doesn’t look great.

Also on offer were trips to the next island Qalito, where the Tom Hanks movie Castaway was filmed- we didn’t go due to rain. I’m sure other islands in Fiji are amazing, especially when the weather is good but things just didn’t go our way.

One backpacker turned 19 while there and partied the night away and we heard him say the next morning ‘that was the best birthday ever!’ So I guess for him Mana had everything! We met some really nice people, but when it's not sunny there is simply nothing to do on Mana Island.

Despite the fact that the accommodation was crap along with the food, the Fijians who ran the place were lovely. On arrival and leaving we were greeted with welcome and goodbye songs

...and there was a different activity each night such as traditional Polynesian, Micronesian and Melanesian dancing, fire throwing and group dancing- Bula!

So we’re not writing of Fiji yet, just check the weather and resort!

Sydney and around

Sydney


We spent our last five days in Sydney and wow, what a great city! We found a room in a hostel ‘Noah’s’ in Bondi Beach, which is just a short train ride from the city centre.

The beach is famous for its Christmas days where the Irish and other foreigners chose to spend the day. For a small beach it usually hosts thousands, but we practically had it to ourselves as it’s winter.
Bondi is a cute little surfer area but we spent most of our time, short as it was, in and around the city.
We managed to catch the last weekend of a three week Brian Eno curated light festival. This included ‘The Lighting of the Sails’ where a multi-coloured changeable light display was projected onto the tiles of the Opera House, resulting in a spectacular show.

Also lit were an old building and various light displays along the peer known as ‘The Rocks’. We also managed to catch a show on the harbour where in re-enactment of a prisoner ship burned in the 1800’s, they burned and sank a prop ship (for three shows a night for the entire weekend) Amazing stuff. Because of this there was a great buzz around the docks with food and mulled wine stalls, along with fire barrels to heat up the cold spectators.

One of the days we took a ferry to Manley Island where we did a gorgeous costal hike for about 10km but unfortunately the sparse mist turned to heavy rain and we decide to bus it back taking the scenic route- via a shopping centre where we stopped for food and a peek around, back to the peer.
Another day we took a ferry over to Toranga Zoo which was lovely- we couldn’t leave Australia without seeing a Kangaroo, Wallaby or Koala!

We also visited Government house once again getting caught in some torrential rain


... and we walked the famous harbour bridge across to Luna Park, which was closed.

Naturally we visited the Opera House, unfortunately unable to catch a show but worth it all the same.


While in Sydney we were also able to catch up with Mary Kerins another great friend of ours.

We just caught her as she was flying out to Perth the next day. Consequently it was a quiet night with a lovely dinner and ended with us being kicked out of a coffee house; they were closing and we’d no sign of leaving of our own accord! It’s so great to meet friends while away, even if it’s only for an evening! Mary, looking forward to seeing you when we all get home in October- or in London!


Our 15 days ended all too soon- although our wallets took a beating, it was a great trip. Of course we only covered a small fraction of this vast land but for now it was enough for us. Did we love Australia? The part we saw was really nice, but we recommend a lot more time and perhaps to do it overland to get a better feel for the place … as for the Australians? We reckon they could do with an extreme course in customer relations with a side helping of manners thrown in- but of course we mainly dealt with those in the service industry or run-a-ways not your average Joe. Will we be back? It’s so far from anywhere else, so probably not in the near future.

Fiji here we come.

Australia- The Gold Coast

Brisbane

We spent the first night at a hostel called Tinbillys- a massive operation complete with loud bar and the obligatory drunken Irish and English. We checked out the city which seemed nice and caught a train to Surfers Paradise the next day.

Surfers Paradise

Surfers is a nice town with a great beach- just a pity it’s winter. When we rounded the corner and had our first view of the beach it was just like the set of ‘Home and Away’!

We’d a lovely walk along it and ended with a picnic in the great beach-side park. We shared our first dorm of the trip with two quiet jet lagged Malaysian girls- so no problems getting a sleep there.

Byron Bay

The next day we took a scenic bus to Byron Bay. We decided to test the tent at a hostel and camp grounds called ‘The Arts Factory’- a pseudo hippy village vibe but with nothing free loving about the prices- $28 to pitch our tent.

Unluckily for us it was the coldest winter they’d had in years and the coldest night to date! Temps dropped to 4 degrees and while our tent was nothing more then a sheet against the wind, thankfully the sleeping bags stood the test.

We stayed two nights and spent our time trekking up through the headland, up to the lighthouse, around the coast; where we spotted some whales and dolphins, and back along the beach.

The town is about as hippy as it gets in Australia, which is not very, with a few shops selling the usual Indian fare and offering massages. We did like Byron, but had to bus it back to Brisbane for our flight to Sydney.

Back to Brisbane

We had more time in Brisbane to really explore the city and managed to get to the modern art gallery and the amazing natural history museum. You really would need a few more days to discover these fully, but unfortunately we were kicked out at 5pm, where all the staff were standing by the door waiting for us with their bags and coats in hand!

Australia- Cairns

Cairns

It was an early touch down to Cairns and we managed to sort ourselves out with a cheap hostel for our five days there. ‘Sunray’ was managed by a Korean couple so they put us in a private room due to our ‘annyeong haseyo’ for the price of the cheap dorms. Unfortunately there was a good reason it was cheap. We found one or two bed bugs, the place was only surface cleaned and instead of backpackers staying there it was full of semi-permanent residents who seemed to have run away from home or jail. The Koreans took off after our first day on their vacation and left the inmates in charge, along with a timid Korean girl on reception. There was an attack when one of the inmates high on crystal meth wielded a knife at another and he was carted away by the police- thankfully we weren’t there at the time. Another day the inmates pooled their limited money and bought a load or meat and shopping, they forgot the lock the doors that night and someone had stolen all the meat by the morning, in response to this one of the girls put her fist thought the glass fridge door and had to get five stitches- thankfully we were also out of the house for this incident- needless to say we didn’t spend much time inside.


The hostel aside we did have a good time in Cairns. There are great out door facilities with a gorgeous walk/runway along the peer leading to a huge outdoor swimming pool with park side bathing area and intermitted exercise equipment. Also great for those with camper vans as there are great public showers and free gas BBQ areas! The rest of the city is tiny and a bit bland, kind of lacks soul. It completely geared up for tourism, great dining and drinking offers in the bars and restaurants and agents everywhere for any type of sport or outdoor activity you can think of. Our highlight of course was diving on the Great Barrier Reef. We booked a day tour with two dives which were awesome. It was over an hours drive out to the reef where we did our first dive unaccompanied by a dive master, but that was ok as we were briefed on the site and just had to navigated around a headland of coral. It was beautiful, the water was clear and warm and just a lovely relaxed dive. We returned to the boat for lunch and headed on to the next diving point. Here we were lucky as a few of the staff were doing a dive and took us along to ‘Shelly’s Other Hole’ (only in Australia eh?) where we did some cave diving- spectacular- and spent some more time exploring the reef. It was fantastic.


The other event in Cairns was when our friend Ollie Connelly drove up with some mates from Townsville - a six hour drive- to see us and spend the weekend.

The three of us went out for a great dinner (thanks Ollie) where the boys ate shark and we started on the Australian wine. We discussed a quiet night having a few drinks around the pool of Ollie’s hotel but those plans were soon dispelled when we met up with his mates. We hit a lot of the bars, with the Irish one being the most fun and ended in Gilligan’s nightclub. Great fun, but why is it that now that we’re older the hangovers are so much worse? Ollie dropped us to the airport the next afternoon and it was on to Brisbane.

Malaysia (Melacca) and Singapore

From Bali we flew back to Malaysia arriving late in the evening, but thankfully managed to find a hotel; one that wasn’t even officially open yet! It was the first night it accepted guests and work was still ongoing for the official opening the following week. Needless to say we didn’t have to worry about searching for bedbugs as we were the first guests in our room. After stocking up on a few essentials and buying a lightweight tent and heavy sleeping bags for Peru, we caught a three hour (freezing air conditioned) bus Melacca.

Melacca

Melacca is supposedly the cultural capital of Malaysia so we were excited to visit. It didn’t let us down, it’s a very pretty town and played an important role as a major port to shipping vessels back in the day. Enrique 'the black', a Melacca resident even accompanied Magellan around the world as his trusty side kick, completely circumnavigating the world, which Magellan actually fell short of doing- according to the local museum anyway. We stayed at ‘Sunny’s Place’ while it was friendly, it’s a dive nonetheless. The town was hosting some dragon boat racing usually held in Singapore or China, so we were lucky to catch it. It was fun to watch for a while, but when no fire sprang forth from the boats we eventually left to check out the rest of the town.

It was definitely worth the visit, We took a site seeing bus and explored all the areas including china town, little India, the Dutch Square, the port and everything else the town had to offer in our two days.

From our hostel we caught the hottest, metal box local bus to the bus station. No matter where you sat the sun poured in and I have never sweated as much in my entire life! Thankfully our four hour bus ride to Singapore was in a fancy well regulated air-conditioned bus!

Singapore- how far can $2 get you?

We didn’t leave ourselves any time in Singapore as we’d spent a bit of time there a few years ago. We did however manage to get our subway tickets, tea, coffee and dinner out of $2 Singapore and one old travel card! After being dropped from the bus we went to the subway station where the ATM’s weren’t working, I had an old travel card from our last visit which I thought was near empty but it actually had nearly $8, we cashed that in and bought our two tickets to the airport. Naturally all the food at the airport was expensive but we were chatting to an employee who told us about the cafeteria down stairs. We followed the signs that said ‘staff entrance’, which we were sure was a mistake, but sure enough there was a huge buzzing food court. The food was dually priced for public and staff (hardly anything in the difference) so even thought we were the only foreigners there it was ok. For under $5 we had a great meal each, tea and coffee (horrible) afterwards and even enough leftover to buy a little bag of sweets for the plane at a stall near the exit!! Bargain and considering Australia is our next destination, I think our last one for a while!

Goodbye to Bali- we’ll miss you!

The sun did indeed shine again and it was down to the beach for us to hone our stills on a surf board.

We took a lesson each, where we were guaranteed to stand up on the board, but in all fairness they were more giant nine foot flotation crafts than surfboards- so we stood.

It was fun the first few times, but the effort to paddle out to the waves and the waiting around got a bit tiring so I later opted for my book and to watch Mal crash around- sorry I mean surf ;)

We spent the next few weeks in Kuta getting settled into our cute Bamboo Inn, taking long walks on the beach. We sometimes found ourselves in Legian or Seminyak thus took advantage of the delicious array of restaurants there offsetting the cost against the great local or warung restaurants closer to home. We found the most amazing- and I don’t write this lightly- warung around the corner from our Inn. I salivate just thinking about it- yummy. Oh the flavours and choice of dishes, a massive meal for a dollar or two, scrumptious. Did I mention how unbelievably cheap Bali is? It is. You can spend as much as you like or as little as possible and still have a great meal and a roof over your head.

The weeks flew by as they tend to do when you’re just blissing out. We visited the memorial monument erected in memory of those killed during the Bali bombings in 2002 which was very sad, seeing all those names, everyone so young, brothers and sisters killed together. It’s terrible, especially for the Australians who took the blunt of the attacks.

There was so much more we wanted to see and do in Indonesia but the time and mainly the budget just wouldn’t allow for all the expensive travel involved. But not to worry, we’ll be back- next time with our wallets bulging!