While staying at Fini we made, like I would call it, a little 2 day trip to Sigatoka and the Sand Dunes. During that 2 days we stayed with two locals at an AirBnB appartement. It was totally fine but you definitely need a rental car when you are there. When it’s hot it’s way better to start early in the morning, so we left at 8 and arrived at the Sigatoka Sand Dunes at 8:30. We both were surprised, that there is a desert on Fiji.
The sand dunes were established in 1987 as the first national park in Fiji. There are 2 tours of which can be choosen. We decided to take the two hour walk to see a bit more of this heritage site. There is also an one hour walk.
After a while it began to get really hot and most of the tour was just walking through the sun, so I definitely recommend to use some sun protection before. First you walk on a path between green fields and forest. The second part was over the sand dunes to the beach and then walking along the beach. We had to look very careful not to miss the sign back to the forest. It was a very nice tour, although at the end we had almost 35 degrees.
The last part lead us through the forest, with wodden figures around the trees. It seemed like they should protect them. And all of the sudden we heard deafening noise made by flying foxes. They hung headlong down the treetops and were pretty huge.
After this sweaty trip, we called our taxi driver to take us to the city of Sigatoka, to visit the local market. That was the first time, we saw the real prices of Fiji. We bought 5 pineapples for 5 F$ (about 2,5€), some bananas for 0.5€ and 3 big papayas for 1,4€. The fruits just taste so much better in their origin country. The avocados are incredible huge, more than twice the size than the ones we get in Germany.
After we got back we sat at the open space of the appartement, where the owners Sunny & Sheeren also like to relax and talk to their guests. Sunny told us something about his 3 kids and his work. He is a fisher. And when he’s not out fishing, he has a little dinner car, where he serves Hot Dogs and such things at the weekends.
He even took us to a holy place, to get some salt water. We had an awesome view there, and a beautiful look at the sand dunes at the sunset.
Our next stop is Vietnam, Hanoi, where we did lots and lots of sights seeing. So keep on reading!