Hi Everyone!

After a very long plane journey to Fiji, we arrived in Nadi in beautiful sunshine. It was 6:30am and we were greeted by singing dancing Fijians in the airport - they were up early! As soon as we were in the airport we went to the travel enquiry desk to find out where was good to go - the man kindly directed us to his "friend" who would help us. She turned out to be called "Margaret" (yeah right!) and quickly whisked us off into her office to sell us some hard core tours. We tried to explain that we would rather play it by ear etc and we just wanted a couple of leaflets but to no avail. Magaret didn't want us to leave without some of our juicy dollars in her pocket! We finally decided that wanted to stay at the island "Tai" - more commonly know as Beachcomber Island, just west of the mainland. After much pretending that the person she was trying to call to book our rooms was engaged i pointed out a number on the leaflet to call - miraculously this rang and she got through to the relevant person (she had been calling herself and pretending the island was engaged for some bizaare reason).

Anyway, the long and short of it was the she ripped us off by pretending that the boat ride was $69 as she couldn't get through to the relevant people. Feeling rather harrassed we handed over the money - only to later discover she had completely ripped us off! Kindly, when we arrived at the island they deducted the extra money we had paid from our final bill.

When we arrived at Beachcomber Island we thought we had found heaven on earth! The sands were beautiful and white and the sea crystal clear - it was a good 36 degrees C when we arrived. We slept in a 100 man dorm, which as u can imagine was pretty cramped! It was good fun though as you got to meet a lot of the other travellers and everyone was very friendly. The days consisted of frazzling ourselves in the sunshine and the nights of drinking and partying and watching Ru trying to win the limbo competition. The news soon circulated the small island that a tropical cyclone gene was soon to be coming, but we were dizzily happy trying to get sunburnt and thought nothing of it.

The cyclone came half way through our second night, and we all had to be evacuated from our dorm into smaller more smelly dormitories as the main dorm didn't have any doors or windows so it was flooding with dirty water and they were worried we may get hit by falling trees etc. At first the thought of a cyclone was quite exciting, but by morning the mood was more sombre! We were very VERY bored as the cyclone continued, devastating most things in it's path. The waves were bigger than any we had seen and it soon got boring! After two long days we eventually managed to get a boat off the island to the mainland, where we enjoyed a few hours of bad weather but electricity - until that went too! The weather is just like home and yesterday the rain was quite bad so we are looking forward to getting to New Zealand on Sunday. We have met a lot of lovely people.

Must go now, but thanks for all ur messages.

All our love, Ru & Ce xxxxx