A quiet day.
We had a late start following all of the excitement on our island yesterday. A peaceful breakfast followed by a quiet kayaking trip, which we both enjoyed before a light lunch in one of the restaurants. It is very difficult to camp out in this hotel as there Re no shops or restaurants anywhere nearby, thus you are in fact a  captive of the hotel.
We cunningly though have booked a shopping trip to the nearest town for tomorrow to stock up with essential supplies and some salad stuff so that we do opened to keep spending money in the restaurants here. We have been further held captive by the fact that this is the Easter weekend and all the shops have been shut for the Easter holiday. I have never been anywhere quite like this, a beautiful location, surrounded by nothing but half deserted fields and tropical forest. The nearest shop must be a ten minute car drive away so possibly thirty minutes walk along the main highway.
We went kayaking again in the afternoon, so you can see how much the expedition manager is enjoying this activity. We also spent some time on the sun beds around the pool and had a swim. It is a joy for me to be able to swim in warm water.
It is very hard to get your head around Fiji, there is no apparent industry, apart from farming and tourism, although there was small scale engineering around Nadi. There appears to be great poverty, but no one is starving, there are no beggars, and the gardens around the houses are well kept. The houses themselves look very basic, four walls and a corrugated tin roof. Most appear to have electricity although there Re no or few streetlights. The people are incredibly friendly and shout at you from the roadside with a friendly"Bula" (Hello) rather than a string of invective.they are always smiling and genial although they are on the large side.
In the evening we had decided to go to a Japanese restaurant in the hotel, once we had determined it was not all raw fish, I might add. This proved to be a theatrical experience, the chef was a real variety turn. Everything was cooked on a hot plate in front of us , and there was plenty of opportunity for the chef to display his culinary skills. He cooked fried rice and for this spears and eg thinly across the grill so it was about two feet long , he turned this into a very thin omelette and then asking Rosemarie to hold one end of a napkin and another guest sat at forty five degrees the other end, chopped the egg into the napkin at incredible speed.
He then put the cooked rice mix into bowls, he flicked one bowl in a complete somersault into a fellow diner's hands, he flicked another bowl in a somersault onto a plate I held so the rice fell out upside down, and finally flicked a third bowl about six feet to another diner, who had to catch it very much like a slip fielder in Cricket. In between all this he juggled with the salt and pepper mils and cooked a meal for six of us sat around the grill. Rosemarie and I shared prawns and a wasabi steak dish and they were both delicious . Our fellow guests, two New Zealanders and two Australians were all good company and we enjoyed our evening together. The couple from Australia were celebrating their first wedding anniversary, so Rosemarie and I bought everyone a drink to celebrate that. The meal flew by partly because the chef was so entertaining.
And so to bed.