Khoackie

HONEYMOON! October 10-24, 2009

We will be going to the beautiful South Pacific Islands of Fiji! We will be staying at the Naigani Fiji Resort for 11 days! Then we ended the vacation at the happiest place on earth, DISNEYLAND & CA Adventures!

Here’s the recap on all our Khoackie Adventures in Fiji through the eyes of Jackie (because Khoa was too busy vacationing to document this trip)!

Journal Entry 1:
So here’s how we got to the one square foot mile island of Naigani, Fiji! We took a plane from LAX and landed in NADI airport in Fiji (10hrs 10mins flight with 2 meals! Score! It’s one of the major airports in Fiji on the BIG island. Then we took transfer flight from NADI to SUVA which is 25min flight on a smaller plane, that took us to the OTHER side of the island (it would have been a 5-6 hour drive), and then took a taxi for about an hour to the port where a small boat took us to the Naigani Island Resort that’s about 35 mins away. This island only has this resort on it, and there’s a village of people that live here too, but that’s deeper inside the island, and the resort is right along the beach. The island is REALLY small, you can walk all around the island in about 5-6 hours. So no, there aren’t any restaurants or shopping to do, just out doorsy stuff like kayaking, snorkeling, swimming, sunbathing, fishing, diving, and you would have to eat at the resort. On our first day there they had weaving lessons, so I learned how to weave a fish out of leaves!

Our villa is really basic, pretty old, not like a hotel style or anything. Khoa’s mom compared it to a room in Vietnam…so that kinda gives you an idea of the living style. All the windows are like glass shutters, so when you close then, it’s not really closed all the way, so noise and air and stuff can still get in. The toilet flushes STRAIGHT down which I thought was interesting. The toilet seats are plastic too rather than ceramic. There’s like only 3 outlets here, 1 every 2 rooms or so, and it’s weird Fijian outlets, so we have to ask for an adaptor from the resort in order to plug in our stuff. Some ants here have HUGE heads, it’s disgusting, Khoa says they’re probably soldier ants. They change the sheets and towels once every 3 days, but the towels are really thin. The island power is ran by a huge generator and so they shut off the power everyday from 2-5AM and PM. When the power goes off, so does the hot water. Sometimes the hot water doesn’t even work so I took 2 cold showers =(. When I shower though, I’m clean, but not CA clean haha. It really does make you appreciate what you have a lot more! Khoa learned to put a candle next to our bed so that when it turns pitch black, he lights it as an old fashion night light for me..=P Yes…mother nature does spook me a lot haha.

There’s no restaurants here except for 1 eating place at the resort, and we go there for all our meals, they change the menu here every day so it’s not too bad, the food is good, I think it’s alright, khoa likes it though haha. He thinks he’s losing weight because the portions aren’t big enough to fill him up haha. We brought some food too to help save costs, but there’s no microwave, just a kettle…so we try our best to use what we got. One of the nights for dinner though, they had a buffet!! It was a traditional Fijian meal where they cook all their food in the ground! I saw a documentary about this when I was on the plane, it’s crazy how they cook it and have layers and layers of food in the ground and they pile it high up and cover it with banana leaves and stuff.

Journal Entry 2:
We also took diving lessons in the pool and then the next day we went diving for real! Khoa was really excited about it…me…not so much haha. I’m scared…it’s that chicken inside of me again. This trip sure is making me face a lot of fears!! Also, we went on a hike that same day around the island, and we went to the top of the mountain and had a great view of the resort and another village on the other side of the island. It was really nice to see everything from above! And dude…hiking UP a big mountain is crazy tiring…haha. We also played pool, and I kicked khoa’s butt both times!! =) The first one might have been because he scratched while trying to get the 8 ball, but still, I win! =)

Journal Entry 3:
Holy cow, I also heard Backstreet Boys’ new single Straight through My Heart on the Fiji radio!! How awesome is THAT! Backstreet’s back, ALRIGHT! Hahah… I should play their new CD on my ipod and expose these Fijians to BSB haha. My work here will be done haha. We played in the pool a bit and there’s a water slide too! So I went on it a bunch of times, it was fun, but I would have went on it more but there was a lil boy playing too, so I didn’t wanna hog it all haha. The previous day, though we went kayaking twice! Once just along the beach and then a tourist family from Sydney asked if we wanted to go with them (husband wife and daughter who’s 15) and so we did. There’s actually a lot of people from new Zealand or Australia here, and their accents are like Harry Potter’s accents so I’m so tempted to ask if they know them hahaha! But anyways, kayaking was fun but REALLLLLY tiring! We kayaked to the other corner of the island and then we snorkeled there (2nd time in my life snorkeling) and it was actually kinda fun. I don’t like to snorkel because the 1st time I did it, I didn’t get the hang of breathing out of your mouth, so I didn’t like it but at least this time, I got the hang of it more and I got a cool view of the fishes and coral and stuff. So it was fun, but the kayak back was like a battle against the ocean! It started raining and the waves got massive, it was like the perfect storm! Ok, so maybe the rain was just the water from my paddle splashing back at my face and the ocean floor was only 2 feet below us, but it was still quite tiring haha. We probably kayaked for almost 1.5 hrs total on that 2nd kayak trip.

Anyways, so at dinner time, there would be live musicians they had this drink called caba? I don’t know the spelling of it, but all the musicians were drinking it, and it’s basically this kind of root that they would smash up, put it in like this clothe bag, and boil it, and make it into a drink. If you drink a lot of it, it sedates you and kinda has the symptoms of like getting high? And if you drink a little bit of it, it makes your tongue numb! So how you drink it is you clap once, they scoop a cup out with half a coconut and you drink it in 1 go, and then you clap twice. So they offered all of us guests to have some caba, it’s not alcoholic or anything, but I heard it tastes bad. So they made Khoa do it, and then one of the guests there just turned 50, and so she told me to try some too, but I said no. But then she’s like come on!! It’s my bday!! And got a small cup for me, it was NASTY and my tongue felt all funny and numb haha. It was an experience I suppose, you have to drink A LOT of it to start to feel sedated though and they had like a huge melon (that’s what they used for their caba bowl) full that they had to finish by the end of the night. Crazy huh? And then Khoa sang 2 songs with the musicians too, Jason Mraz’s I’m Yours and Michael Buble’s Save the Last Dance For Me! I have it recorded =).

Journal Entry 4:
So the next day, we finally went to go see the dolphins, Khoa said that we were going to swim with them, but I was convinced we were going to cause they’re taking us to the ocean, and you can’t just swim in the ocean! And so we went on a boat 35 mins out to this area where you can see ALL these dolphins. The closest they got to our boat was maybe 20-30 ft? BTW, dolphins kinda look like sharks….hahaha, I was KINDA nervous at first haha!!! And I was right, you don’t swim with them, you just watch them! Hence, dolphin watching! Silly Khoa…haha. It was alright, it’s cool to see them in their natural habitat, but they didn’t any neat tricks flips in the air or whatnot, so I told Khoa next time, I’d rather go to sea world haha. The trip was kinda miserable though because it started raining, and the waves got REALLY rough on the way back, and it got foggy and we’re on a small boat, so we got drenched, I was FREEZING (I was only wearing a tank top and shorts!) and the boat driver was fishing on the way back too, and he caught 4 HUGE fish, probably about 24-30inches or so each! That was probably the most excitement of that trip, but man…it was cold and rough…I just wanted to be home. The rest of the day is mellow because the weather isn’t too great today, it’s cloudy and the waves are really rough, rainy too. So we couldn’t do much out-doorsy stuff since that’s what this place is all about.

Journal Entry 5:
So we finally got to the last full day in Fiji! Yesterday we started our day by scuba diving!! We did some practice stuff in the water before we explored and we had to do this practice where you practice retrieving your mouth piece under water. Oh man did that freak me out haha. You let go of your mouth piece, and you have to take it back and then blow air out in order to breathe again…it’s hard to explain, but that’s like your only source of air…and so I had a minor panic when I was doing this haha. But I succeeded in the practice and obviously survived since I’m writing this as we speak. Scuba was fun for the most part, I finally got the hang of balancing (buoyancy myself?) in the water so I can control how deep I want to go, but my ears did NOT like this experience haha. Khoa had a blast and wants to go again, but once is enough for this trip =P. We got a lot of cool underwater pictures though! It’s at the same place where we snorkeled last time, but we got deeper obviously so we got some cooler pictures.

After scuba-ing, we did some more kayaking. We went on single kayaks this time so I was kayaking by myself for the first time and it goes A LOT faster! I got no fatty on the kayak to slow me down hahahaha! =P After dinner yesterday, we were walking back to our villa (which is called a Bure pronounce bur-ray) and we looked up in the sky and it was SOOOO clear and you can see the stars SOOOOO well! It was actually really amazing! We tried to take a picture, but obviously it didn’t capture it, but man, you can see sooo many stars and it was so right and clear, it was really cool. Today we went fishing, we did hand line fishing and trotting. Hand line is when you have a cylinder wheel thingy and there’s fish line wrapped around it, and you attach bait and a sinker (something that’ll make your bait sink) and you just toss it into the water, and if there’s a bite, you pull up the fish. Trotting is when you have a fake fish as bait and you use a fishing rod and you let it into the water while the boat is moving, and when there’s a bite, you stop the boat to reel it in. It was fun, but unfortunately, we didn’t catch any fish, booo. A lot of the times though, the fishes ate all my bait, and I tried to pull it up, but they always managed to get away =(. Also, we played volleyball today, and it was guests against the staff members at the resort. It was really fun. I did my best to dodge away from the ball whenever I can haha. I’m not very good at it, but I am good at serving the ball. I scored quite a few winning points that way, woohoo!! =P The people here are VERY good though, it’s crazy haha. Also, even in Fiji…I can never get away from people calling me Jackie Chan =/. What gives?!?!? haha. Oh and Khoa didn’t put sun block on AGAIN even though I told him to, so he got a funny shorts tan line =P

This next day is our departing day. We started out with breakfast, the usual fruits (papaya, pineapple, cantaloupe, watermelon, etc.), omelets, toast, and sausage, and passion guava juice! Then we took some more pictures around the island, and when it was time to go, a lot of the staff members sang us a farewell song! It was really touching. Even the local island dog came out to say goodbye! We got on the boat to the big island, took the taxi ride to the airport, and eventually got back to the United States in LAX. I said eventually because we almost didn’t make it to the main airport, but let’s just say we had to take a 3 hours bus ride to the main airport just to catch our flight to LAX, it was not fun. Anyways, we finally got home and enjoyed the rest of the honeymoon at Disneyland! =) The whole vacation was awesome, and we were totally grateful for the once in a lifetime experience in Fiji.