Jungles and Cockroaches.

Since Fiji is a third world country there aren't many hiking trails to explore but Rob, our New Zealand friend, told us about this hike he and his wife went on. He told us that they found these giant rock caves and a rock bridge that's 20 feet in the air and 40 feet long, but he and his wife had to blaze their own trail. According to him "Its not that hard." He explained it by saying " You just go up the drive across the street from my house and take a right once you get to the hill and you go up a little bit. You're going to get to a spot where you see a rock face and you wonder 'hmm... how am I going to get around that?' so you go off to the right and you poke around a little and you find a way up. After that you keep heading up to your left up to the top of the hill and once you get up there you'll say ' there's not much to look at up here' so you head down the other side and you poke around some more and you'll get to a spot where you're between two hills. Once you're there just keep poking around and you'll find it."

First of all, you don't "poke around" in the jungle.

The driveway across the street wasn't a driveway. It was an overgrown crossing on a ditch. About ten feet in we saw two fist sized spiders. I decided to use a stick to literally "poke around" and knock spider webs down. There was no trail whatsoever. We got to the rock face and made it around. And we did make it to the top of the hill but it took a long time. The "hike" he told us to go on was just an adventure in super dense jungle with those giant spiders about every 15 feet. Once at the top day seemed to turn into dusk with foliage so thick you couldn't spot the location of the sun. But this didn't deter us.

After the rock face we were positive we were going the wrong way but there wasn't any other obvious path so we decided to make our own. Eventually, we somehow circled around the rock cliffs that capped the hill. For some reason I thought we were in the right spot to start heading downhill toward the caves. Maintaining traction on the fallen leaves and steep grade was almost impossible. It finally got to the point where we realized we were either really lost or the New Zealand couple were out of their minds. I think it was a little of both. We headed back the way we went and finally made it to the bottom with no regrets of our first adventure into the bush. I'm still determined to find the caves though.

A few weeks later (October 15th-ish) Rob and Penny came back to Savusavu and took us through the caves:




There was a cockroach INSIDE our mosquito net this morning, for anyone who was curious.