Back to the garden of the sleeping Giant

Rowena

Beautiful Bella Playing with the stones.

On Wednesday Tony had to head back to NZ for work. We took the boat back to Vuda Point and Mary, Rowena and Naomi stayed for a further three days, flying out of Fiji on Saturday, Rowena and Isabella to Wellington and Mary to Auckland. We spent those days lazily doing some laundry etc, swimming in the pool at 1st Landing, shopping in Nadi and visiting the Garden of the Sleeping Giant. While at Nadi we visited the Hindi Temple. A number of years ago Rowena had spent some time in Northern India and so she was very interested in the temple. We were lucky because the priest there took a real liking to Isabella, playing with her for ages and explaining the paintings and his beliefs with Rowena. Everone there loved Rowena's dreadlocks. Aparently very religious people have them in India and so they assumed that Rowena was one of them. We then did some shopping before catching the bus back to Vuda. Poor Isabella was exhausted after that expedition. On Friday we made a picnic lunch and took it to the gardens. It was a great day because it was a little overcast and not too hot. Isabella had a great time wandering around and picking up stones and leaves. She picked up a long seed pod and chewed it and was very angry when we took it away from her. It wasn't until we were driving back to Vuda in the taxi that Abdul explained to us that the pods were tamerind and perfectly safe to eat. There are several trees at vuda and so Rowena and I tried chewing the pods. They were delicious, tasting of across between raisins and dates. No wonder Bellla loved them.
We packed up and left the boat at 7.30 on Saturday morning. Then Tony picked me up from the airport in Auckland. We stayed there until Tuesday afternoon and caught the plane to Wellington so that we could be there Dad's birthday.