1/3/09 This day was taken up with the four/four and a half hour bus ride from Nadi to Suva, finding a place to stay there and settling in. We were dropped off next to Albert Park; it's lined with palm trees, is on the seafront, and the Australian aviator Charles Kingsford Smith landed here on one of his two stopovers on his epic flight across the Pacific. We dumped our bags on a bench, and while Dave looked after them, I walked round to the first place on our list of places to stay at. It's called the 'South Seas Private Hotel', but has cheap dorms as well as private rooms. They did have spaces, so I went back to tell Dave, and we lugged our bags round there. In Albert Park there seemed to be a big event on, with gazebos, loads of people dancing to music over a loudspeaker, a guy talking loudly in Fijian over it, and everybody cheering every now and then. For quite a while we wondered what on earth was going on, because the gazebos had 'Police Academy' on them but we couldn't see anybody in uniform around. Then we heard the words 'Alleluya', 'Pastor _' and 'Praise the Lord' being mentioned, so we realised it must have been some special evangelical occasion. The dorm was empty apart from us, and in fact we seemed to be practically the only people in the entire hotel! The South Seas Private Hotel is unique in Fiji in the fact that it's made entirely out of wood, and the decor inside makes it easy to imagine that it's back in the 20's and you've arrived in the colonial South Seas after about a month at sea in a passage liner, ready to swim, take a walk down Victoria Parade and have a game of bowls and a drink at Suva Bowling Club - or it's a couple of decades later and you've got here via an epic, gruelling flight with numerous stopovers, lured by the bright 'Travel to the South Seas' posters at home. They had a lot of these posters framed, as well as old photographs and maps. It was nice to stay somewhere so old (in Pacific terms) and full of character, especially as we haven't stayed anywhere else like it in any other country. After we'd dropped our stuff off in our dorm, we walked into town to find somewhere cheap to eat. A shower had come over, and it was now after dark, but the people in the park were still singing and dancing merrily in the rain. Before we'd got very far we came across a food court with a Chinese food place open, so we each got some fried beef & vegetables and rice, because we'd be looking round town properly tomorrow anyway.

2/3/09 We went into town, and almost straight away Dave was accosted by a suspiciously friendly Fijian guy. Warning bells started sounding in my head, and then rang wildly when he put a wooden mask in Dave's hands, asked his name and then got out a small carving tool - we'd read about this scam in our guidebook, so I grabbed hold of Dave and said to the guy, "we don't want to buy anything!" Dave repeated this, and the guy moved off, without getting aggressive thankfully. What they do is get talking to a tourist, ask their name and then quickly carve it into a mask or sword; then they force the tourist to buy it. After this we carried on, and made our way to where the visitor information centre should have been. All we saw were offices, so Dave went in and asked where it was. The guy he asked actually walked us over to where the other info centre was, because he said he was about to go on his lunchbreak anyway. He was wearing a grey sarong - it looked exactly like a normal, wraparound skirt, so it must have been his 'work' sarong. I hadn't realised that native Fijian men wore them in the city as well as in the islands - it was slightly disconcerting to see about half of the men in the street walk around in skirts. When he'd shown us where it was and had left, however, we saw a notice on the door saying that the visitor info place had closed down because it was relocating to Nadi!

We decided to walk on to the bus station, to investigate where we'd get tickets back to Nadi from on Wednesday and how much they would be. When we arrived, there didn't seem to be any ticket counter, so we wandered around for a bit looking for one until finally asking someone. The bus station looked a lot how one would look in India - decrepit looking buses, lots of dust, etc. - but without all the beggars. The chap we asked was very helpful, and took us right across to the other side to a row of stalls. He stopped at an empty one, spoke in Fijian to another chap who was hanging around (asking where the guy was who sold tickets to Nadi), and waited with us until he arrived. Unlike how it would be in India/Thailand/Cambodia, he didn't ask us for anything in return for his help - he was just being nice. After finding out the price etc., we walked back into the centre and got some lunch. After lunch, we walked along the seafront back towards Albert Park. We came across a couple of strange looking flat-topped trees on the way, with very feathery leaves, and a tree which had what looked like massive foot long runner beans hanging down! On our way along we also came across a small 'peace garden'. Like yesterday, there were groups of local guys playing touch rugby in Albert Park. We walked along Victoria Parade, between the park and the sea, until we reached Thurston Garden - botanical gardens which were founded between 1912-13. In the middle of the gardens is Fiji Museum, our main destination, but outside it was a small clock tower; it's apparently the only functioning example of a dual chiming clock in the world (it rings each hour twice, so that whoever misses it the first time can hear it the second time.) Fiji Museum was very interesting - it had a huge old Fijian sea canoe, part of the 'Bounty' ship (of Mutiny fame), a copy of the document which proclaimed Fiji as a British colony, some rocks which had been used as head-bashing stones on human victims meant for eating, lots of information about the history of Fiji both pre- and post-European discovery (including about the old whaling, sandalwood and beche-de-mer (seaslug) trades, and the minor Chinese and major Indian immigration in the past 130 years or so.) There was also a small gallery with lots of fascinating photos of modern Fijian life in Suva. We went home after that, for a bit of a rest. In the evening we walked into town to find somewhere to eat, but there didn't seem to be any for within our budget. In the end we found a shopping centre with a place that did pizza and burgers etc., so we shared a large Marguerita pizza and had an icecream each to finish it off.

3/3/09 We had a bit of a lie in before going into town. The first place we visited was the Roman Catholic Cathedral, just to see how it differs from cathedrals in Britain. It was small for a cathedral, and had two floors; to begin with I thought it was closed, but then I noticed that there were winding stairs on each side, so we went up them and discovered the main entrance above. The decoration was simple - some stained glass, but not much else apart from some carved coloured wooden plaques of scenes from the Bible. There were open doors all the way down one side of the building. I reckon the ground floor must just have been used for storage or something, because I never saw any way down there from above and it seemed closed up from the ground.

On the other side of the road from the cathedral there was a 'Hare Krishna' vegetarian cafe. We were just passing by it when Dave noticed that they had a counter full of Indian sweets, so we stopped. I was overjoyed to discover that they had some 'jalebi' sweets (crispy rolled out and curved together strips of batter covered in syrup), because that was something I was desperate to try in India, but never came across any apart from in little roadside stalls with such suspect hygeine I never took the risk of buying any. They were extremely cheap, too, so I bought one - it was as lovely as I'd always imagined. After this we had some lunch, bought from a local bakery. I had a 'egg top bun' and a coconut bun - both large and absolutely gorgeous, with a perfect texture. (The 'egg topping' was just a crumbly mixture on top.) Then we went off to the Municipal Market, so that I could fufill one of my long held desires - to sample a breadfruit! The main bit of the market consisted of hundreds of fruit & veg stalls, some having piles of monkey nuts as well, and a couple of egg stalls, but on the edge of the market where it joined onto the bus station, there were some selling small bits & bobs and sweets as well. I noticed that the aubergines were much more purple than the ones in Britain, and the breadfruit were much larger and lighter in colour than the ones on the tree we were showed in the Yasawas. As well as more normal fruit like avocado, bananas and coconuts, and vegetables like the aubergines and carrots, they had more unusual ones (to us) like cassava and sugar cane, as well as ones we didn't recognise.

he man who sold me the breadfruit told me that you can either fry it, or cut it into little bits and boil it until it becomes a mush, so we decided to do both. Before we went back home to cook it, however, I went into a souvenir shop and fell in love with a piece of painted 'tapu'. This is a traditional sort of cloth made out of pounded strips of mulberry bark, and this one had a map showing all the islands of Fiji painted onto it. It was surprisingly cheap, so I bought it and went straight to the post office to send it home (I thought I'd better post it home rather than get hassled about it at Customs in Auckland.) We also popped back into the Hare Krishna restaurant and bought another sort of Indian sweet, made out of milk powder, sugar and lime, which was lovely.

The man had told me that breadfruit was sweet, but we didn't think it was at all, when we cooked it int the evening; it was just completely bland. The texture was a bit odd, like a cross between potato, taro and the inside of an aubergine. I liked this, but taste wise it really could have done with something with it. I think it would work well whether sweet or savoury; honey, maple syrup or chocolate sauce for example, or butter, white sauce or meat and vegetable chunks. After cutting it in half, Dave cut one half into slices and I fried them. I was taken aback at how quickly they started to burn, even with the heat turned down, and even when the outside had fried yellow (there was no brown inbetween, just yellow then burnt), the inside seemed to have remained intact. When I tried them I thought they were quite nice, just bland and filling, but Dave didn't like it much at all. There was no way I could eat all of them though, so after a few slices we went straight to the other half. This we cut into small chunks and boiled, like the man had said. When I guessed they were ready, I mashed it up in some of the water, but it just turned into a slime. I forced myself to try a little and didn't like it, unsurprisingly, and Dave didn't even touch it! I think that was my fault, though, because I reckon that if I hadn't left any water in, hadn't overboiled it deliberately and had mashed it with a bit of butter and a splash of milk, it would have been pretty nice.