Not Much Traveling, But Some Learning...

Family, first meal in Nausori
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SF to LA, LA to Nadi, Nadi to Nasauri by cab.

We didn't really have time to travel much because of all the craziness regarding the property sale. We stayed with family in a place called Nausori (on the eastern side), far away from tourist places. Still, I had a decent time there because of the people.

I did learn two things from this trip:

1. Tourists mainly see the beautiful beaches and carefully maintained resorts of Fiji, which are great and all, but really just a facade of what Fiji really is - jungles, forests and lots of pollution from diesel-run vehicles. There's also a lot of problems between the Fijians and the Fiji-Indians on the island - although the Indians created most of the infrastructure and helped transform Fiji into a major destination, the Fijians are still destroying their crops and killing their cattle out of spite. Well guess what, if another coup happens (the last were in 1989 and 2000), more people will leave and then the whole country will likely go back 100 years.

View outside of the house
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2. The places we visited were extremely poor, yet the people we met were extremely generous and friendly. They all had large families and lived in houses with tin roofs and wood plank floors, yet sat and talked with us for hours and cooked more food than they could afford. Yes, they are impoverished, but what they lack in goods they make up for in spirit. The indigenous villagers there were also very friendly and welcomed us when we visited their Koro (small village) - a stark contrast to the needless violence against Indians in many other places.

Guard outside of the president's house
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The only "touristy" places we really went to were a few beaches around Pacific Harbor and some shopping trips around Suva City.

Note that I actually took around 200 pictures. I'm only including a few here for flavor.