ProDive Cairns

Back in Fiji!! Never thought I'd be so grateful to have the shaky unreliable internet back at USP haha. So to continue where I left off, the company we went out on the reef with was called ProDive. We spent 3 days and 2 nights on the ship and did a total of 11 dives (including two night dives).

There were almost 40 of us in all, with 33 passengers and 6 crew members all on one ship. It got quite cozy with all of us!

Gear all ready

But it wasn't until I saw my "bedroom" that I felt like I was truly roughing it for the few days I was out there. It was tiny! My roommate and I could barely maneuver to get out and around each other when we were both inside.

Bunk beds!

My roommate's name is Alisha, she was also my dive buddy as well. She's from Baltimore but has been in Cambodia for the last 9 months so we had a lot in common and became good friends throughout the course of the trip. 

 The eating area was called the "saloon" and had three large tables to fit all of the us. The food was pretty stellar, its been awhile since I've eaten three full meals a day with snacks in between!

The "saloon"

Before each dive, we had a dive briefing to give us some information of the layout of the reef below us, depths, time limits, etc. Arik was our dive master, he's from Poland. Our other crew members included people from England, Sweden, Holland, and South Africa-it was a pretty cool mix of people!

The trip went by so fast, we were literally either diving, sleeping, or eating. Not much time for anything else! Biggest nature sighting was a whale shark on our last dive. I didn't know what it was at first...we just saw this huuge massive thing in the water, honestly I thought it was a ship sinking at first haha. Then we saw the spots and put two and two together, but it was still scary seeing how big it was! I didn't realize how uncommon it was to see it until we had gotten back to the boat and realized how jealous those who missed it were. My favorite was still the sea turtles, they're so graceful when they swim and look goofy when trying to use their fins to help them eat their food. 

Everyone right before our last dive briefing

Definitely a once in a lifetime experience that I will treasure for a lifetime. Lots of interesting people from all over the world and plenty to see under the water. I learned the best way to experience diving in a particular area is by doing a liveaboard trip. Because we were there for 3 days, we had enough time to get to some more secluded and far out places on the reef as opposed to the reefs closer to shore that the day trips visit. The better pictures of animals are on my previous post so check them out if you haven't!

Found Nemo :)

Cairns - on the Great Barrier Reef

Internet is a bit slow on the boat so I'll have to upload more pictures later. But we're over halfway done with the trip, I've spent the last two days on the Pro-Dive Cairns liveaboard ship and have been diving in the outer reefs of the Great Barrier Reef. Several different dive sites so we've seen several different environments. We've even done two nights dives! Once you're in the water its not so scary, its the fact that you're jumping into dark water of swarming sharks that gives you the chills. But then you realize they're just there because the fish they eat are attracted to the lights of the boat and they don't want much to do with you.

With my dive partner, Alisha 

Advanced Open Water certified...what do I do now???

Shark!

Moray eel

Turtle!-my favorite animal in the water

 I saw an assortment of stuff today: tons of fish, turtles, clams, sharks, sting rays, moray eels, jelly fish, you name it! There are a total of 33 divers on the boat, and some of them are kids studying abroad just like me. Everyone's been great fun, it will be sad to part ways with them tomorrow! The first dives went towards my advanced open water diver certification so we focused on navigation, buoyancy control, depth (up to 30 meters), and the night dive. Now with my certification, the remaining dives are just exploration and pleasure dives!

(Thank you for the pictures, Dive Master Arik!)

Sydney!

So below are the promised pictures from the Nadi flooding we witnessed in the bus on the way to the airport. Fortunately our bus was able to plow through it, but anything smaller than a minibus had to turn around. It’s still a big improvement from the pictures from the earlier flooding in the week!

Still exhausted from the flight last night and realized that I need to be up at 4:30 for my flight tomorrow! Another non-crazy night for this party gal…but I have already met friends at the hostel and from the plane; they’re definitely keeping me company and keeping me from feeling alone. I obviously knew what I was getting into when I decided to travel by myself, but it doesn’t really hit you until you’re getting off the plane and ask yourself “what do I do now…??”

Easy enough, people at the airport helped me, and people at the hostel helped me, and even people on the street helped me today. Haha, so much for gaining independence. Today was spent walking around the city; I found a great walking tour that was “free” (In Fiji, you don’t tip anyone…at all, so it took a sec to realize that here you have to tip everyone for everything again!) The walking tour lasted around three hours but it was a nice stretch of the legs and some fresh air after all the rain I’d been used to.

A very simplified map (my hostel was just beside the Sydney Town Hall)

We started by walking up past the Circular Quay, which has a big ferry station and railway station. We walked up along the Harbor up through The Rocks, a very quaint and older area of town.

Circular Quay Station

The Susannah House-oldest accommodation in Australia

Opera House!

Street Markets in The Rocks

The best view of the Sydney Opera House is from this side of the harbor. We heard several stories of colonial life, and how Australia was pretty much founded by convicts transported from England.

We walked up through Martin Place, the “ritzy” area of town and then down through Hyde Park. What I liked about the park is how clean everything was kept, reflected in the cleanliness of the entire city. Granted I didn’t venture into the “dodgy” parts of town, but just up along the harbor was very well kept.

Military Memorial in the center of Martin Place

Martin Place Steeple

 The Archibald fountain is in the center of Hyde park and St. Mary’s Cathedral is on the opposite side of the park.

Archibald Fountain

St. Mary's Cathedral

Hyde Park Barracks (houses hundreds of convicts in colonial Australia)

We also strolled through the Botanical Gardens. If you explore deep enough, you can even lose the sounds of the cars and trucks and forget you’re in the city. At the edge of the gardens is another view of the Opera House paired with the Harbour Bridge. Except this side isn’t nearly what I thought it’d look like.

Sydney Botanical Gardens

Botanical Gardens again

Harbour Bridge and Opera House

Doesn't it look weird from the other side?????

 After the tour I asked for what I must do if I had the afternoon open and several people said I had to go up the Sydney Tower. While it did have a spectacular 360 degree view of Sydney, I was sad it didn’t have a good view of the Opera House. I think it would have been more fun if I had known more things to look for. It was easy to spot Hyde Park and St. Mary’s Cathedral and you could see the green from the botanical gardens. The other spots included Darling Harbour and the Harbour Bridge but beyond that, I felt like there were just small bays or skyscrapers. Nonetheless, it was fun being 300+ meters up in the air!

Darling Harbour

Harbour Bridge 

Hyde Park

Top of the Sydney Tower :)

 Like all trips, Sydney was too short. It was long enough to get the city atmosphere again to keep me from getting homesick, but I what was originally intended as an extended layover turned out to be quite the adventure. It was hard during the tour hearing all the things I could've done had I stayed longer, but I know that Cairns will offer just as much excitement and even more fun. I cannot wait to start my scuba diving adventure!!!! Love and miss you all!!!

Australia trip part 1

Hi everyone! Alive and well from Sydney, Australia :) Pictures will come later today as my walking tour of the city starts in 30 minutes. Yesterday was a lonnnnggg day of travel...up at 5:45, taxi rides, shuttle rides, 4 hour bus ride, 4 and a half hour flight, more shuttle rides...haha but I made it!

I have a few pictures of the floods we passed through in Nadi yesterday, nowhere near the severity of the flooding earlier in the week. I'll post those when I put up the pictures of today!

Miss and love you all!!!

Recognition for community service in Sote

Hi everyone, so we lucked out big time with the cyclone. Apparantly it shifted south of us and besides a little rain, we'll be ok. This news article came out recently about our community service work while we were at Sote. It has some great pictures and explains what we did for our projects! Check it out:
Sote Village School Gets 405lbs of Books

Recent Flooding and Current Cyclone Watch!

By the time we had left the Fijian National Archives on Friday afternoon, the rains had started! Thankfully, Suva has a pretty solid drainage system and haven't had too many problems. However, other cities weren't so lucky. If you have a second, please check out Fiji Ministry of Information's photos as they have done a great job of capturing the current severity of the recent flooding in fiji: Fiji Ministry of Information

There were some really devastating photos, and the rumors are that around 80,000 people have been separated from their homes in one way or another (mind you, Fiji's population only totals 800,000!). People are working hard to reconstruct the bridges that have collapsed, especially on the main highway connecting Suva to Nadi. There are already several relief organizations in place helping people salvage what they can from their homes and providing volunteers to clean up the areas where the flooding has occurred.

Courtesy of Image South Pacific

The floods from the first rains calmed down yesterday (Sunday), but Cyclone Daphne has decided to grace us with her presence. We are now currently under "cyclone watch"; everyone is awaiting where and when this massive storm will hit. Class are cancelled for tomorrow, thank goodness I got my midterms finished today! Power continues to go on and off, the longest we've had it off has only been around 7 hours. 

While there are currently bigger problems (i.e. people's homes...), a lot of us international students are awaiting the status of our flights and spring break plans. I have booked my flight from Nadi to Sydney for Friday and was looking forward to beginning my Australian adventure later this week. Hopefully the roads will be manageable again; domestic flights are iffy but most all international flights out and into Fiji have been postponed as of now. Hopefully Daphne won't hit to hard and we can keep continuing to clean up the entire western and southern coastline of Viti Levu!

If anyone is interested, other reliable news source include: The Fiji Times and Fiji Village. Please keep all those in Fiji in your thoughts and prayers at this time!

Update late March/early April

Hi everyone, finally experiencing the scary weather that island pacific nations face! I'll explain later in the post but the power outages and internet troubles have taken forever to get back up and running, hopefully next time it won't take so long for me to blog :)

So originally I had planned to blog about the Tongan King who just recently passed away. Because USP is the University of the South Pacific, we get several students from other island nations such as Samoa, Cook Islands, Solomon Islands, Papa New Guinea, Vanuatu, and Tonga to name a few. In some of my classes I noticed that several students were dressed all in black. This was tribute to the King of Tonga, as the whole nation is in a 3 month traditional mourning period before the new king is inducted.

The University held a memorial service for the king on campus and my friend Lina from my Pacific literature class was decorated in traditional dress for the ceremony.

Lina and I

Our photographer wasn't stellar, but you can tell that she's is dress in all black with a woven "mat" tied around her midsection. There were several people on campus that day so it was easy to tell who was Tongan!

The next big news was visiting the Fijian National Archives:

Being such a small, less-developed country, they do not have the same system of document preservation and organization that the US uses. We saw some pretty cool first-hand documents that were originals that we were allowed to touch and flip through. We even flipped through the very first Bible translated into Fijian and the first Fijian Times ever printed (it was from around the 1850s).

First printed Fijian Times

While we did have an organized tour, we were free to roam about all the documents stored in the library. Several included cool things like police evidence from court cases, immigration statuses, census information, prison details, etc. 

Access to so many files!

Me lost among the books

We also learned the stages of microfilming and the conservation and preservation of these important founding documents. The process is a very long process and takes meticulous concentration and patience. The sector is already understaffed as it is, but the employees there work hard every day to preserve their nation's history.

Document preservation

They have no computerized processes at all. In fact, the only computer in the whole facility is used to monitor and examine the microfilm reels of the documents.

Example of micro-filming

Microfilming is simply taking the original documents and "filming" them, so that there are copies on negative strips that you'd see from a manual or an old-fashioned camera.

Evan and Emily examining records

 It was very interesting to be able to get a 'behind the scenes' tour on how they operate at the national archives. I was surprised on how much freedom we were given to explore the documents and examine first hand their methods of document preservation.

Next to the map of Viti Levu

 While it did feel a little "field trip-y", I had a great time and learned a lot. The Fijian National Archives are a great resource for college students to use, and the staff there are so friendly and willing to help you uncover any information you're looking for.