Savusavu - restocking

The view of Savusavu from our mooring - we're in a very sheltered creek about 300m wide, with the exit to the sea to the right of this photo

We arrived back in Savusavu last Thursday after a good 50 mile sail from Viani Bay. Just in time to inflate the dinghy, fit the outboard motor and go ashore for a really wonderful Indian meal at the Surf & Turf restaurant. How good did it feel to have someone else cook our supper? Very. Delicious ice cream for pudding too!

Savusavu is a pretty good little town with a couple of decent supermarkets, a brilliant fruit and veg market, a great butchers and a choice of places to eat out inexpensively - fish & chips lunch at Waitui Marina was only $5FJ (about £1.70) each and very good. In fact we've only had the two meals out because the availability of fresh ingredients and excellent meats has revitalised our enthusiasm for cooking aboard.

The little Copra Shed Marina which owns the mooring we are using - a waterfront bar and restaurant, a pizza restaurant and very good laundry service makes it a great and very welcoming base. 

We'll be here for a few more days because we have applied to extend our 4-month visas; the paperwork (and our $96 per person fee) have been accepted by the Immigration team here but the visas have to come from Suva and this takes a week, apparently. One suspects that Fiji's bureaucrats learnt everything they know from the time when Britain administered the country. 

Meanwhile we been busy and have taxied our propane gas tanks to be refilled, dinghied our jerrycans to the nearest fuel station to refill with diesel (cheap at about 50p per litre) and completed several shopping runs to replenish Maunie's empty food lockers. We're certainly paying for the zero-expenditure period that we enjoyed in Fulaga! Our timing has proved to be pretty good, as it happens, with a few days of strong winds meaning that we wouldn't have wanted to be sailing between the islands just at the moment.

We're looking at our options for the next six weeks or so. We'll start looking for weather windows to sail back to New Zealand around the middle of October so in the intervening time we want to visit parts of Fiji that are new to us. The islands of Kadavu and Ono, to the south of the big island of Viti Levu, are said to be worth spending some time on and we think we should visit the capital, Suva, as well. More to follow.