Birthday

I'm 23, weird! I also have a million + 1 mosquito bites on my feet, ouch. I don't know when they got me.

My birthday was cool in a weird way - it really doesn't feel like it's that time of year, and hence I feel a bit incredulous that it was my birthday at all. The day had a somewhat inauspicious start as we spent the night in a horrible dorm in this hostel - the aircon was broken, the fans were ineffectual, and it was so hot and humid...we both lay awake most of the night just sweating. Ew. We got up early and checked straight into a much more upmarket hostel right along the beach, and decided, as it was my birthday (and also as it was the only room they had left) that we would treat ourselves to a double room, ensuite, aircon, balcony, seaview...oh man it was so nice.

Vic bought me this necklace that I'd wanted from one of the islands...so cute as she managed to sneak off and get it without me noticing!

Having lounged around in our beautiful room for a bit, we decided to take the treat to the next level by getting our laundry done for us: having been on the islands for 14 days, and of course travelling for 3 months now, as you can imagine we had a lot of truly disgusting clothes...and the idea of having someone else take them away and deal and give them back to us DRY was just way too tempting. So, we packed off ALL of our stuff, and spent a few ours lounging about clad only in towels. All was fine until, at 4pm, the promised hour, we were presented with HALF of our laundry: the other half had mysteriously gone missing and we were told various stories about where it was..."it's being soaked", "no one but the laundry operator woman can operate the machine so we can't retrieve your clothes for you". This wasn't too bad for me, but a bit of a setback for Vic as ALL of her clothes were missing: she had to borrow stuff from me. It wasn't so much the immediate inconvenience, more the fact that we were concerned that our clothes had a)had a terrible accident, or b)been sold into slavery in Nadi market or something. It took until lunchtime today to get them back...big sigh of relief.

So anyway, despite our wardrobe choices being considerably restricted, we headed out and did some birthday celebrating...I called home, which felt the wrong way round, but I guess since I am in Fiji with no phone I have to accept that it's hard for people to show they care. We had dinner in our hotel with some girls who we'd met on one of the islands, hung out, drank some elaborate looking cocktails, then headed up to a different bar along the beach to meet up with some other people. This is when disaster #2 struck as Vic opened her wallet and realised that $50 was missing...and we just have NO idea where it can have got to. It's unlikely that it was stolen, but we also can't figure out when we would have lost it. This sucked, obviously, for financial reasons, but also from a practical perspective: there's no cash points around here, and that was the last of our cash. As a result, we're reduced to eating only in our hotel and charging it to our room! (yes, I know, dangerous...we're trying to keep track). It was also annoying in that it restricted the birthday night-out potential, as we couldn't get a taxi to the one pub/club place that Nadi has to offer. (This canadian guy said he'd take us there and we could pay him back in drinks, which we could pay for on a card. I would have accepted, but Vic stepped in as the voice of reason and stopped me...probably a good thing, though I'm sure he was a nice guy!) Instead, we stayed around the bars on our section of beach, and ended up drinking and playing cards with some drunken Irish guys and girls, the canadian (who is a pilot, how cool!) and a Fijian guy. Much fun.

Needless to say, today we checked straight out of our posh room and back into a dorm for our last night of travelling.

I can't believe I'm losing Vic, it's going to be so weird trying to make decisions on my own...but I've met loads of other people who are going to be in Sydney, and I'm feeling pretty positive right now. By which I mean incredibly excited, with an edge of hysteria. Woo!