{"id":4416,"date":"2018-01-31T18:39:42","date_gmt":"2018-01-31T23:39:42","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.sunflowerit.ca\/travel\/auto-draft\/"},"modified":"2025-07-02T13:36:47","modified_gmt":"2025-07-02T17:36:47","slug":"bula-awesome-fiji","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.sunflowerit.ca\/travel\/cycling-travels\/cycling-oceania\/new-zealandaustralia-2017\/bula-awesome-fiji\/","title":{"rendered":"Bula. Awesome Fiji"},"content":{"rendered":"\n

This blog entry for our Fiji trip was meant to be very short: eat, rest and play \u2013 but we got carried away with some trip details to support some of our pictures. Our visit to Fiji, namely the Yasawa islands, exceeded our expectations. Hope everyone can visit Fiji one day.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\u201cWhen you land in Fiji and are first welcomed with the greeting “<\/i>Bula!<\/i><\/em>” (pronounced boo-lah!), you will certainly feel you have arrived somewhere special. The Fijian people are exceedingly warm and friendly and they love to express their love of life and their genuine hospitality with infectious, enthusiastic, and ubiquitous <\/i>“Bulas!”<\/i><\/em>\u201d <\/i>quoted from<\/a><\/p>\n\n\n\n

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2018.01.18 \u2013 Auckland (NZ) \u2013 Nadi (FJ) \u2013 Finally the day had come for our reward vacation to Fiji. We started to plan for this trip during our stay in Wellington over the Christmas holiday. We knew little about Fiji until we read the Lonely Planet(LP) travel guide. We realized that Fiji was not a single island but was made up of over 330 islands, of which 110 were permanently inhabited. We also learned that most visitors who wanted to enjoy beautiful beaches and snorkeling headed out for two groups of islands, the Mamanuca and the Yasawa, located west of the main Fiji island of Viti Levu. These islands were serviced by a daily large catamaran boat, dubbed the Yasawa Flyer(YF). The furthest island stop was reached after 5 hours of riding the YF.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

We left our Auckland hotel at 6:30am using the hotel\u2019s courtesy airport shuttle. We left behind our cycling equipment and tandem at the hotel\u2019s luggage room. Our travel luggage consisted of only our two front bicycle panniers and our small day pack. We needed to purchase some suncream at the airport\u2019s duty free as we had left our newly bought suncream at the hotel knowing that we could not go through the security screening with it. Our 3.5 hours flight to Nadi, a city on the west coast of Viti Levu, was uneventful. The Nadi custom and immigration were quite efficient. Outside the airport, we were expecting a bit of a chaotic haggling environment but we were surprised by the orderly and respectful folks. We took a taxi to our backpacker hotel. Around 2:00pm, we checked into the Aquarius on the Beach hotel, located half way between the airport and Nadi\u2019s city center. Feeling the warm heat of Fiji, we felt sorry for all of our family and friends back home going through a cold winter (well not really!). We had lunch beside the pool and splurged on some cocktails. Later, we visited a store to stock up on bottled water for our island hoping adventure. A salesperson at an outdoor store in Auckland, who had visited Fiji, advised us that water was quite expensive on the islands \u2013 the further the island was from main island of Vitu Levu. Based on his advise, we opted to buy 4 bottles of 3 liters of drinking water (more on that through out this post). We had our evening meal at a near by Korean fast food.<\/p>\n\n\n