The Pearl South Pacific Resort Spa And Championship Golf Course Pacific Harbour

... of the train, I could only consider it a huge disappointment. The views were nothing compared to some we had seen previously in New Zealand, and the train itself was pretty run down. By this point however I had decided to fly to Sydney the next day to surprise my Irish friends, so was in pretty high spirits regardless.
We returned to Christchurch, and went straight away to the Escape office, where they very kindly paid for all our accomodation and ...

... Pacific Harbour was a managed development in Fiji. The entire area was planned and developed with hopes of a swanky resort town with lots of large building lots for people to build vacation properties. A golf course was built and there are many upscale resorts. However, the anticiated boom never came and the town was pretty quiet while we were there. After talking to locals, they noted that the current economic conditions made things much worse and many of ...

... com. Overall though, we enjoyed the reef dives more than the shark feed. Although the sharks are beautiful to see, the dive was packed with people and felt very staged. We are catching a flight to Taveuni in the morning. Taveuni is said to have the best soft coral diving in the world. If it is better than what we've already seen, then we will have to come back here again. We will be back in the US in a week (June 4)... this trip has gone so fast!

... very sad to leave the island. The international flight leaves at 10pm so in reality we had an extra day of sun and snorkeling at Mana island. Our transfer to Nadi airport was on a very small 6 seater plane (see pic). Quite unexpectedly this was probably the smoothest plane ride we've ever had. It's a 19 hour difference in time-zone to LA because we'll be crossing the International date line which is quite mad!

... our diving mates. Luckily there is a 'spare' dive master, who does not speak any word of English but, hey, we are under water: we cannot speak anyway. And he does a good job. I thought he would lose us in the current. He did not. At the end, we do our safety stop. I find it hard to breath. We go up, only, I cannot breathe anymore! I am out of air. Not low but OUT. No breathing and no air in the BCD to go up. Fin, fin, fin. Without air ...

... It is at least 3 hours. Highway 1 is in good condition but it IS a 2 lane road with buses, trucks and ****** cars. Somebody warned us about potholes. They surely never saw the potholes in Botswana. Indeed, arriving in Pacific Harbour after 3 hours, we immediately find: http://www.fiji-sharks.com/ AND: the shark dive is on tomorrow! We sign up and pay: 220 local $ (=110 Euro) per person including ...

... you might ask, what happened to the freak of nature beetle? We're not sure...when it landed on the bed right next to Brandt, the beetle started to crawl away. When Brandt returned with tissue to kill it (Of course I wasn't touching that thing!) it was long gone. We looked for it for about 10 minutes, turning on every single light in the bure, and there are A LOT of lights! but, no beetle...I'm still on the look out of it...and a little scared to ...

Hi Everyone Just to let you know that we're off island hopping in the Yasawas tomorrow which are a group of islands which we have to get to by boat so we'll be spending 2-3 days on each sleeping in bures (mud huts)!!!! Don't think we'll have internet access while we're there and it's going to take us about 14 days to do it so might not add to the blog for a while. Speak to you as soon as we can. lol L & K xx ps we've added some photos