Disneyrau

Well, Denerau is tourist central in Fiji. There are several huge luxury yachts on the docks, and as you walk up from the dinghy dock you arrive at Hard Rock Cafe Fiji. There are 5 or 6 fancy resorts on the island, and tons of boats coming and going taking tourists out to islands for the day. It was a bit of a culture shock for us at first, coming from small villages, uninhabited islands, and our home base Savusavu which consists of a few blocks of shops and restaurants and 3 small marinas.

But we acclimated quickly and took advantage of some things Denerau had to offer: iced chai, coffee milkshakes, piña coladas, mojitos, free wifi at Cardo’s restaurant.

While in Denerau we visited with Em & Sid & Dylan every day. Dylan is 7 months older than Wade, and he loved to give Wade kisses. His kisses are actually licks, so Dylan tasted Wade’s hair and face and back. 🙂

We had lots of fun swimming in the pool at the Hilton with Wade & Dylan.

Em did 3 loads of laundry for us, Sid cooked us several dinners on the barbecue, and Em & Sid babysat Wade so we could go out to dinner! Wow, so nice. We came back from dinner to find Wade asleep on Uncle Sid’s chest. Oh, and they took us out to dinner for a wedding present.

The Kent Matthews family came out for a daysail to a nearby private (oops!) island. We still played in the water on the beach and ate ice cream.

Riki got a haircut and shaved off his beard–all of it! I had never seen him completely clean-shaven before. I also got a haircut, while holding Wade on my lap for 30 minutes.

After our friends left, we got down to business and hauled Guava out of the water. At Port Denerau Marina they don’t let you sleep on your boat while it’s in the yard, so we sprang for a night in a fancy hotel with the money from our honeymoon website. Lucky Wade & I got to hang out at the Sofitel at the pool while Riki busted his ass in the boatyard. Riki had the bottom wetsanded, bargained for a good price on the Prop-Speed, and put two coats of bottom paint on himself and raised the waterline too as Guava is loaded with more…stuff. But the major accomplishment was Riki removing the exhaust manifold from the boat (which took about 3 hours), and engineering a creative way to fix it using a fancy high temperature hose rather than rebuilding the galvanized pipe (they had none) or using stainless pipe (had to be ordered from Suva and was very expensive). I was amazed that Riki got everything done in just 2 days on the hard.

Here is the culprit exhaust manifold and the welders working on repairing it.

Next we provisioned in Nadi, spent a day at the dock washing Guava & filling up on water & schlepping fuel, had one last dinner out, and we were off to the Yasawa island chain.