Tuesday, March 19, 2024

20 March 2024 Lautoka Fiji

 We had the Taste of Fiji tour booked through our travel agent for today. Last night there was some heavy rain showers in the area. After wandering around the port looking for our tour, we ran into two other ladies looking for the same tour through Good Sites. We finally got hooked up with out tour driver, Manasas, in a small van. It was just the four of us. We headed out of the town of Lautoka to a small village for a welcoming ceremony of Kava. When he turned off the main road, the road ahead was flooded. After several minutes of conferring with other people stopped by the flooded road, our driver decided to proceed on through the flood. We made it through the flooded stretch of road and up to the village. There we learned that the tour company had canceled all the tasting appointments due to flooding. But they had not canceled the tour. Our poor driver, not knowing what to do, proceeded to drive us around the city of Lautoka and Nadia before taking us back to the cruise ship before noon. The country of Fiji is very poor, the roads and infrastructure is crumbling and all the homes and buildings we saw looked like they were crumbling into the dirt. We were happy to be back at the ship in time for lunch. Back at the ship, we learned several of the ship tours had also been canceled due to the flooding. We were so surprised at how bad it was, we didn’t even take pictures. This is not the Fiji you see in the resort brochures!

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