It was strange leaving Australia...it seems to have gone way too fast! It made it all better however knowing we were flying to Fiji!

Tom and I had pre-booked all our accomodation and had decided to spend 6 nights at a place called The Beachouse on the Coral coast in the mainland of Fiji as our first stop. This was pre-booked back in August when we were still at home so we had completely forgotten where it was or what it looked like. Anyway we jumped into a taxi to make our way there. I asked the taxi driver how long it was going to take thinking maybe 1/2 hour max...his reply was 2 hours! 2 hours! You can see we do our research! The taxi driver then told us about the recent 'happenings' in Fiji. I was like 'happenings'?? Isn't this the island of sun sea and cocktails? There should be no happenings! Apparently there was a military coup in the past few weeks and its unsafe for tourists to wander around at night in the big cities. Luckily for us we had no interest in doing that anyway.

So we arrive at our destination...finally! Check in and we were very very pleasantly surprised. The place was amazing really for the price. It took me about a day to realise it is actually the set where they filmed Celebrity Love Island. The 2 way mirrors all over the place gave it away. I thought the crew had used the place as their accomodation I didnt realise it was where they actually filmed it! So anyway i spent the rest of the day saying 'oh thats the kitchen/bar bit where Paul Danan flipped out' 'Ooh thats the decking where Jane Middlemiss did her yoga everyday' much to Tom's annoyance!

The 7 days we spent here were pure relaxation and fun. The staff were great and knew our names within a few days. We met some lovely people from all over the world but we spent most of our time with an Irish couple called Wardy and Shauna and an english guy called James. When we weren't playing beach volleyball and snoozing in the hammocks we were playing deadly Irish drinking games or Killer Pool. On one of the days we did a jungle trek and hiked up to a really beautiful waterfall where we spent an hour or so sliding down rocks into the unknown. It was fun though!

We spent Christmas at The Beachouse which was strange. its never the same when you are away from home. It was nice to be somewhere so beautiful but it didn't feel like Christmas to any of us that were there. We all got so drunk on Christmas Eve -Shauna's fault - she taught us some random drinking game with a pack of cards that left most of the lads wearing girls bra's! It was really funny but Chrismas day went in a blur. We had a traditional Fijian dinner called a Lovo which is various meats and fish and vegetables cooked in a big underground over for hours. It was nice but we did miss our Christmas dinners.

The second half of our trip was to be spent island hopping. So we said our goodbye's to The Beachouse and our new friends and set of at 6am on the 27th December.