Tropical Christmas

Santa came!

Merry Christmas to all our lovely friends and family from sunny Fiji!!

We have had an absolutely glorious day on the beach; it's not been traditional for the most part, but the kids (mainly Adam) woke up early, santa managed to find us and we had chicken for Christmas dinner but that's where the similarity ends!

Breakfast

Our "usual" breakfast (they have kept our breakfast the same everyday as the kids loved it so much..) Passion fruit, mango and pineapple from the garden, honey from the neighbours, an egg and these little puffed up fijian pancakes... Just yum!

I don't think we'll get this kind of individual Service in the resort on the island we are moving to tomorrow!

Bamboo gathering for the house, after raft sailing failed!

We spent the morning on the beach, sunbathing, playing with abandoned bamboo rafts (unsuccessfully trying to lift them back in the water!) and building bamboo houses.

The Coast here is surrounded by a coral reef breakwater about 200m off shore so the water inside this lagoon area is practically current free and at most only up to our belly height, perfect for nervous snorkelers.

Adam practicing his swordsmanship

Even without swimming we could walk Liss out 10m to see nemo fish, blue/yellow fish, sea cucumbers (Euw... Small fish hide inside their bums!!) and black and white striped fish plus some beautiful bright blue starfish that Iseo, the owner here, showed the kids how to pick up :-). Frey enjoyed using her underwater camera today!

Poor old Adam's hand managed to come across a hornets nest this afternoon, in one of the trees in the garden. It swelled up pretty quick, and is still pretty big now, despite Fiji's finest natural remedies all being bestowed on it (and a sneaked in western dose of piriton!) but, I think he was more distressed that he couldn't use that hand to play with Santa's little lego set!

Christmas dinner was an traditional Fijian Lovo Feast. These stones were all placed in a roaring fire for an hour, then the hot stones put in a pit in the soil, it was then lined with coconut tree branches, the meat and veg were wrapped in banana leaves and placed on the top. It is then covered with more banana leaves, wet hessian, a tarp and then buried in more soil and left for a few hours to steam/roast/bubble.

The final dinner ended up as 7 different dishes including chicken, stuffed beef and pork belly, tapioca leaves in coconut milk and fern and tomato salad. We all ate well!

So, we will miss the Queen's speech and the turkey sandwiches, but as a one off, it was a pretty great way to spend Christmas Day :-)