News on Fiji

Not sure if everyone has heard but the political situation in Fiji has taken a turn for the worse. A couple of weeks ago Mum mentioned she had heard, while in New Zealand, that there had been an attempted Coup. We checked it out online and found out that the military had made some demands that the President step down, which the President refused to do.

The advice at this time was against all non essential travel to Suva, this is the capital of the main island of Viti Levu and for travellers to be cautious while travelling in the rest of Fiji. Our plans were to fly into Nadi on Viti Levu, further along the coast from Suva and then to travel to some of the more remote islands called the Yasawas. We emailed the British High Commission in Fiji asking for their advice and decided to see how the situation would develop in the next week.

This Saturday we checked our emails and had recieved an emailing stating that the Foreign and Commonwealth Office had issued advice against travel to the whole of Fiji for all but essential visits due to increasing tension between the government and military.
We have made the decision not to travel to Fiji this time, and our travel agent has sorted out the flights for us.

We still fly from LA to Fiji on the 21st of December, arriving in Nadi International Airport at 5.55am on the 23rd of December, but we now fly out of Nadi to Auckland at 7.10am on the 23rd of December, on the same plane. We should arrive in Auckland at 11.15am (local time) on the 23rd December 2006 and will hopefully be able to spend Christmas with our friends Alan and Cath.

We both just wanted to keep everyone informed and updated on these changes to our itinerary, tune in next Sunday for the usual weekly Blog from deep in the Peruvian Jungle!