Thursday 8 August – successfully tied up in Vuda marina

Around 8:30am we dragged ourselves out of bed to do the last two hours to the marina. We got the sails up and had a very gentle sail up until the wind died. We finally made it into our berth squished tightly between a Gin Palace and a big Dutch monohull. Rowan did very well manoeuvring us in, thankful that there was no wind to contend with.

The marina lady gave us the details for going to a doc at a brand new private hospital in Nandi. Jane my proxy godmother had given me a prod to see a doc, which was just what I needed. Still no improvement after starting my second lot of antibiotics. It was a 20 minute taxi ride to the hospital, Rowan dropped me off and went to the fresh produce market to get some much needed tomatoes and veg. The hospital was very impressive, nurses monitored all my vital signs first before I saw the doc. The doc had one look in my ear (which was rather painful) and said it was still wet and infected. As it has not improved with 2 weeks of antibiotics, she has given me another type of antibiotic to take at the same time and has booked me in to see an ENT surgeon on Saturday afternoon. At least I feel like I am getting somewhere, but have to say I am not enjoying taking so much medication.

We enjoyed the taxi ride, the marina is way out in a rural part of the island. Lots of farming, loads of sugar cane with a very quaint old narrow gauge railway running alongside the road, for transporting cane. There was a lot of dramatic volcanic rock formations that did not have a lot of vegetation growing on it, which made it look as if the lava flow was recent, but Anan the taxi man assured us there hasn’t been an eruption in recent history.

We returned to the marina for a late lunch with Wendy and Phil who had done an excellent job of hosing down PolePole. The evening was short lived, everyone was in bed by 8pm except me, as my new antibiotic has to be taken on an empty stomach, ie 2 hours after a meal.

This is what we woke up to

We went from Dravuni island to our blue dot.

You can see the ring of reef we had to get through last night to get to Nadi