On to Savusavu

One thing we will say about Fijian men - they are industrious entrepreneurs. Tony our taxi driver is back at First Landing as promised the next day to pick us up and shuttle us back to the airport for our flight to Savusavu. Once they have a line on you, they will play up every service they have to offer. We will learn this again with Hussein, our taxi driver in Savusavu.

Tony drives us back to the Nadi airport in his ramshackle yellow cab, telling us stories about how the mongoose came to the islands, about wasps, the sugar cane industry and the lack of poisonous snakes in Fiji. At the airport, he informs us he is the president of the taxi drivers association. When are we coming back? He will pick us up. More Fijian entrepreneurial spirit.

The plane to Savusavu and the island of Vanua Levu holds no more than 12 people. Inside the airport, they weigh our bags and then ask US to stand on the scale so they know our weight and can balance the plane - it's that small! Jenn has a small freak about doing this as maybe she indulged a bit too much during the Christmas holiday!!!




There are three other passengers and two pilots. We self assign seats in the back of the plane, bravely (we think) right next to the flip-up/drop-down door. The other two are in the middle and one girl chooses the front. One of the pilots gives us a flight safety talk that lasts about twenty seconds and consists of, "If we go down, there's a life jacket under the seat. Oh, and start praying." From where we are sitting we can see straight into the cockpit (no steel anti-terrorist doors here) and right out the front window at the runway ahead of us. The pilots work together, both of their hands on the flaps to get the plane airborne. Jenn pops an Ativan at this point and with a painted-on grin proceeds to tell me that "she is FINE".



(Surprisingly???) it is an uneventful flight - a good opportunity to see the island of Viti Levu from above and then the surrounding Pacific and all the coral reefs. Fiji consists of 302 islands and we see a few of them during our flight.







The other couple on the flight is from Eureka CA, heading to Vanua Levu to visit his father who recently bought land on the island. A typhoon last year swept down just about every remaining tree on their property, just after it had just been cleared. They were heading back to supervise the new clearing work and the replanting, although the girl emphasized she was "not doing shit." She read Cosmo throughout the flight, an article on how to arouse your man - always important information after a typhoon strikes.