We have been back from Fiji a month and change and I am just now getting to posting pictures…you would never know I am on vacation… 
I decided to split the Fiji trip into a few different posts…mostly so I can write about how crappy Robinson Crusoe Island is…
We have been to Mexico a couple times and stayed on all inclusive resorts so we knew that going to Fiji and staying in a pay per meal/pay per drink resort would be a little different. Aside from having to pay for everything the biggest difference was just the mood on the resort…it was super calm and chill…a lot of families and older couples.
Not really knowing how much stuff cost we swam up to the swim up bar on Day 1 and looked at the menu. Beer were like $10 and mixed drinks were like $23…boo! All the restaurants on the resort were pretty expensive as well. We quickly realized that the litre of gin we bought at the duty free was a good decision and would be our savior at least for a few days.
Drinking Gin in the Pool
The resort was really nice…beautiful pools with sand right up to the edge of the water so it seemed like a real beach. Later in the week we walked to a few of the different resorts on Denarau Island and some of them looked a bit nicer but ours had the best pools without a doubt. It was nice to have a no-kids pool too so you didn’t have bastard kids splashing around and stuff…actually we were pretty much the only ones in the no-kids pool most of the time.
Pool at Radisson Fiji
The island that we stayed on (Denarau Island) is basically 5 resorts side by side and you can go from resort to resort and eat at different restaurants or sneak into their pools. There is a bus that takes you around the resort loop and takes you into the port which we used a ton. The port was super touristy kind of like a fancy strip mall with a bunch of separate restaurants…absolutely no locals that were not working. Most of the stuff in the port was pretty reasonably priced…we had dinners there and they were around $50/person. So we ate there a lot and also killed a lot of pizza on the resort.
Back to the drinks situation…the first day we had a bottle of gin but we had no mix and nothing that we could drink it out of in the pool. Also we didn’t really know if you were allowed to mix your own drinks and take them down to the pool…nobody else seemed to be doing it. We chanced it and picked up some insulated travel mugs and some mix at the port and tried to be pretty stealth about it (Some people later told us that it was pretty obvious what we were doing)…none of the workers said anything about it all week. While we were picking up the mix I took a picture of the same bottle of gin that I paid $70 for in New Zealand the day before that was selling for $140 in Fiji. Crazynesss…
We had planned on doing a bunch of day trips (surfing, snorkling, swimming with manta rays) but it was all pretty expensive so we decided to just chill in the pool for most of the week and only really left the resort to go to the port for dinner, one trip into the neighboring town Nadi and a day trip “cruise” package called Robinson Crusoe. More on Robinson Crusoe later…
Nadi was pretty poor…before we went into Nadi we kind of thought it might be a good idea to rent a car tour around for a day but after walking through the town we kind of realized that it might not be that hard to find trouble in Fiji. Some people looked pretty desperate and it was really run down and dirty.
All in all we had a great trip though…weather was almost perfect (a couple days were overcast but still warm) and we had a lot of fun.