Christmas and New Years

First of all, sorry everyone for not posting in over a month. A lot of things have been going on lately, and it has been a while since we've made it to the internet cafe.
Leslie had to travel back to the states for Christmas because her grandmother recently passed away. She is sad, but told me she was happy to see her family and friends in Oregon. I am looking forward to her returning to Fiji tomorrow. As you can imagine I miss her a lot.
Since Leslie was in the U.S. for Christmas, I ended up traveling with Peace Corps volunteer Nuper, our adopted daughter in Fiji. We left on Dec. 24th on a ship called the Westerland, sailing overnight from Lautoka to Savusavu. Remembering the Peace Corps motto "Be Prepared" (or is that the boy scouts?), we smuggled a 5th of Bounty Rum onboard with us. The boat ride was 12 hours long, getting into Savusavu at 5am Christmas Day. We did not have anywhere to sleep on the boat, so we found a nice spot on the deck, poured the Bounty into a Gatorade bottle, and did our best to make the journey fun. We did a pretty good job having a good time until about midnight when we were just too damn tired. We made friends with some locals (not at all hard to do in this country), drank some kava, played a guy's guitar, and made a drinking game out of a video game on our cellphones called "snake". In the end, fatigue got us and we had to pass out on the deck along with everybody else. We probably got about 2 hours of sleep.
When we arrived in Savusavu we headed to the house of some other Peace Corps friends who agreed to put us up for a couple of nights. We spent two days in Savusavu, snorkeling at least 5 hours both days, and then headed to Taveuni. The nearshore snorkeling in Savusavu was impressive. I saw a lot of fish species that I only see on offshore reefs in Rakiraki. Savusavu itself is a very nice and tidy town. A lot of yachties come here and never leave.
Savusavu was nice but Taveuni was amazing. The first place we headed was a small village on the eastern side of Taveuni whose name I probably can't mention on this blog because of Peace Corps' policy. The village name literally means "forbidden water" (look it up if you have a fijian dictionary) and they have one of the oldest and best managed marine protected areas in Fiji. The difference we saw when snorkeling between the village fishing grounds and the Marine Protected Area was stark. The fish inside the protected area were enormous! We saw massive schools of harlequin sweetlips, giant sweetlips, bluefin trevally, peacock grouper etc. We also saw several sea snakes and two hawksbill sea turtles. The villagers were very welcoming and did not charge us to use the MPA since we were staying with a volunteer and therefore entered the village as guests rather than tourists.
From the village we also did the Tavoro waterfalls hike, taking time to swim in each of the three waterfalls. The water was cool and clean. I spend so much time swimming in the ocean that I was surprised at how much less bouyant my body was in fresh water. I had to tread water to stay afloat.
After three nights in the unnamed village we headed to a camp ground in the touristy northern part of Taveuni to celebrate the New Years with a bunch of other Peace Corps volunteers. We had a very wild, but safe, time. There must have been about 20 volunteers staying in the camp ground. It really was a lot of fun, and the only thing that could have made it better would be if Leslie had been there.
I am now back in Savusavu and will be heading back to Viti Levu on Sunday. Leslie will be back in Fiji at that point. Well, that pretty much sums it up. I hope everyone had a good Christmas and New Year.