The Melbourne Cup crab races

Day 4 of a 7-day Fiji Islands cruise

Today we spend the day in Savusavu, the second largest town on the second largest Fijian island of Vanua Levu. The population is less than 4,000, so still not that big by many standards.

We spent time in the morning discovering the town and its culture. It has one main street, which is a hub of activity for the southern side of the island. It was market day, so it was interesting to look at the various stalls; many having a wide variety of kava, and others with various fruit and vegetables, many of which were unfamiliar to us.

We laughed when we saw this vehicle outside its store, and of course Greg had to go in and check it out. Let's just say it was a very scaled-down version of any Home Depot we've ever seen.

It may have been small, but here are the views from the front entrance. 

They sure beat the views from our hometown store.

This flower wasn't for sale in the store, but rather was one of many lovely flowers around the property.

Savusavu is set on an extinct volcanic crater, and its main industry is fishing and processing copra. I learned that copra is the dried kernel of the coconut, used to produce coconut oil. Its once thriving cultural pearl farming had been decimated by Cyclone Winston the previous year.

In town we sat and had an interesting conversation with an Austrian who had retired early and had chose to live in Fiji. He said the cost of living was low, and the pace of life was ideal for him. When I asked what he did with his time he said that everything took twice as long in Fiji, because of 'Fijian time', and that few things were truly essential, other than to enjoy life. That fit with what we'd already noticed about the Fijians in that we didn't see anyone getting agitated or annoyed, and never saw anyone argue with anyone else.

On our walk back to the boat, we had some amazing views of the South Pacific ocean. There is a common saying of being 'on island time', where the pace is slow and relaxed. I thought of how relevant that saying would be for this boater in such an idillic setting.

Many afternoons with our cruise we had the option of snorkelling from a dedicated glass-bottomed boat that was brought with the ship. We took advantage of that most times and did so on this afternoon.

Our ship's crew had multiple roles, and so they also served as our evening entertainers. Some nights it meant having a piano player or guitarist, but this night was an exception.

The mark in the photo in front of the crew member is actually a cluster of four live crabs that were the entrants for the Melbourne Cup Crab Races. Passengers created 'syndicates' to bid on buying a crab to enter the race.

The white space you see is actually a tabletop, and the first crab to fall off the edge of the tabletop was the winner. It's amazing how long a crab will hover at the edge before taking the plunge!

The winners chose to donate their winnings back to the local school and/or the crew and so the races were for a worthwhile cause. 

Fijians are resourceful when it comes to entertaining on a low budget! Passengers were happy to see that the crabs were taken ashore the next morning and returned to the ocean.