CORAL COAST, FIJI

Chris has been sick as a (very sick) dog for the past three days; some sort of intestinal illness, probably from drinking the local water. He hasn't been able to eat or drink anything during this time, which is (understandably) making him fairly miserable. So far I've been spared, thank god. My goal is to at least make it to India before getting violently ill, but we'll see how that goes....

This morning we took a taxi into Nadi (the local buses don't run on Sunday), then caught an express bus along the Coral Coast toward Suva. Unlike the local buses, which are basically no-frills school buses, this was a really nice coach with carpeting, A/C, and an entertainment system. In fact, they were playing the DVD of Peter Jackson's King Kong, which was interesting, considering it hasn't been released on DVD yet. :-) It was kind of a surreal experience watching the palm trees fly by outside while listening to the movie sountrack, which consists mostly of Naomi Watts screaming.

After a couple of hours, we reached the Beachhouse, a backpacker resort about halfway between Nadi and Suva. (It's only a few miles down the road from the Warwick resort, where I stayed several years ago on a trip with my mom.) It's a nice place, with a restaurant, a private beach, and a number of bungalows in a tropical garden setting. It's a lot more lush here than in the Yasawas, and there are cool red-and-green parrots and big fruit bats in the trees.