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| Photo of beach at our second Fiji house. |
After booking the house on the island of Savusavu, Fiji for 89 days ending on December 6, 2015, as described in this previous post (click here), we had a month “to kill” before our upcoming cruise as described in our posts of a few days ago, leaving Sydney, Australia on January 5, 2016.
Originally, we thought that the easiest thing to do was to stay in Sydney for the month over the holidays. After considerable checking for one-month vacation rentals near Sydney, we had little luck. With the holiday season in full force, the rentals were either already booked or too expensive.
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| Veranda overlooking the pool. The average year-round temperature in Fiji is in the 80F, 30C range with little variances from month to month. |
Staying in a hotel in Sydney for a month was another option but proved to be prohibitive when hotel rates were high and we’d have no choice but to dine out for every meal. (Although, next month we’ll be in hotels for a month split between Paris and London, in both cities we were able to get excellent rates and, most importantly, we’d budgeted for these expenses).
However, we hadn’t planned for an expensive month in Sydney, no doubt a beautiful city. Most likely, we’ll have an opportunity to see the sights of Sydney when we are on any of our three cruises in Australia.
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| The kitchen appears to have everything we’ll need. Many of these photos were taken at night. We’ll be taking plenty of photos during daylight. |
At this point, we discussed our options. We had to get back to Sydney by January 4th for the upcoming cruise the next day.
With Fiji’s 120 day visas for US citizens, we had the option of staying another month in our booking in Savusavu, a separate island in Fiji with challenging transportation, or, as Tom suggested, fly to the main island of Fiji to ease the flying back to Sydney on January 4th. We both agreed this was a better plan.
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| Most likely we’ll find a table somewhere in the house to use as a coffee table. |
While I was busy logging all the data for our recent multiple bookings, Tom went to work to find something suitable on the main island of Fiji. Much to our surprise, in only one day, he found the house which we’re sharing today.
We booked this house from December 6, 2015 to January 4, 2016 when we’ll fly to Sydney, spend one night in a hotel and board the cruise the next day. Whew! Lots of monkeying around!
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| We love having a pool! |
After contacting the owner, we worked out an equitable rental amount, paid the deposit, and took a deep breath, knowing this leg of our journey was handled.
Here’s the link to our second house in Fiji, on the main island:
http://www.homeaway.com/vacation-rental/p3665385
When the January 5th cruise ends in Auckland, New Zealand on January 19, 2016, we’ll rent a car and make our way to the Alpaca Farm as posted here.
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| Side yard. The ocean is beyond the bushes. |
With our comprehensive record-keeping, it’s easy to keep track of the “holes” in our itinerary. At this point in time, we have only a few one-night hotel bookings and a few flights yet to book, all the way to the last booking ending on June 26, 2016, almost two years away. It’s too soon to book anything beyond that date.
Knowing that we’ve booked two years out with deposits paid and rental agreements, in hand we can now sit back and enjoy ourselves knowing that we don’t have to think about future bookings for another year.
Yesterday, Tom and I were giggling over how much we both enjoyed this process over the past month. The anticipation and the hope of working out equitable rental amounts and deposits left us flush with excitement as we waited to hear back from owners of the various bookings.
Over the past month, I was often so excited that I awoke early in the morning to see if we’d heard back from an owner overnight. In many cases, there was as much as an 11 hour time difference making communicating online tricky. We’d jump for joy when we’d see that our proposal, or a workable alternative to our proposal, was accepted by the owner.
Settled down and content with the outcome of our hard work, we can’t stop smiling. Yes, we know that there will be mosquitoes, no screens (we have no screens now), creepy-crawly, and flying things but we’re tougher now.
On both islands in Fiji we’ll have several hours of driving on scary bumpy roads from the airport to our homes, one as long as the four-hour drive in Belize. Here again, we’re tougher now and give it nary a thought.
We continue on, dear readers, fine-tuning our skills and our psyches as we grow and learn more each day as we live as nomads exploring the many treasures our world has to offer.
Tomorrow we’ll share our most exciting booking since we began our travels. Please check back!
Photo from one year ago today, July 9, 2013:
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| It’s ironic that here we are in Madeira, Portugal one year later and we have similar puffy clouds as we watched in the mountains in Boveglio, Lucca, Tuscany, Italy. Although close to the ocean in Madeira, the clouds are much denser. A year ago, we wrote the story of living life without cell phone service when no SIM cards were available. For details, please click here. |