Turnbull Family Pacific Tour 2015

Tomorrow is our last day in Fiji, before heading to Tulsa Oklahoma on Saturday to spend Christmas with Catheleen's family. After Tulsa it is back to Ottawa before the New Year. On these last days of our trip abroad, sitting by the pool enjoying the weather, it's as good a time as any to reflect on the trip and write my last blog. Thank you to everyone who has kept reading throughout our adventure. I'm thinking about gathering up this blog along with the kids' blogs and Catheleen's Facebook entries, and creating a book for our coffee table. I think it will be fun to take the book off the shelf years from now, and reminisce about our family trip to the Pacific back in 2015.   Catheleen and I had been thinking about taking a mid-career break (Catheleen would say late-career break) to do some travelling with the kids for years. We agreed a year ago there was no better time than 2015 to do so. John (now 13) and Elizabeth (age 10) were old enough to get some experienc...

We're at a Outrigger Resort on the coral coast on this last week in Fiji. The resort is very nice - similar in many ways to the resorts we've visited over the years, but different. When we arrived at the resort we drove up to park our car, and were greeted by the attendant. As he opened the gate, he raised his hands high in the air and yelled "BULA!" in a loud booming voice. It startled the heck out of us, and then we started to laugh. The attendant does this every time we park the car. Today was a rainy day, so John asked that I play bingo with him after lunch. To my surprise I won the first game and a free cocktail. John was one square short, and kicked himself that we didn't swap bingo cards at the start. As I said to John, it's nice to win. Elizabeth joined the kid's club today, and enjoyed hiking, egg tossing, snorkeling, and boogie board racing. She was the only kid her age there who wasn't from Australia or New Zealand. She said that her new fo...

We're back at the Hilton for an afternoon by the pool. It's not as hot today which is nice, and it's certainly been good to get to the pools this week, something we missed in Australia and New Zealand. It gives the kids access to some exercise. Yesterday we visited the Sobeto Thermal Mud Pool. I wasn't keen on going at first. Something about the thermal part didn't appeal - it's already hot here. Also I wasn't thrilled about the mud part - who wants to get all dirty? But as it turned out it was a fun activity and I'm glad we went. When we first arrived at the mud pool in bathing suits with cameras in hand, we were presented with buckets of mud drawn from the mud pool. We proceeded to coat ourselves in mud from head to toe, and then we let the it dry. I found it cooling to be covered in mud. I can see how this works for elephants and other animals. It must be the combination of protection from the sun and the slow evaporation effect from the drying mud w...

I think the quality of life for Fijians is about average for a developing country. Their standard of living is about the same as Indonesians based on their incomes. Not as high as Thais, but much higher than Vietnamese. About 70% percent of the Fijian population relies on subsistence farming. Quality of life, based on the human development index, places it in the middle rank of countries. Average life expectancy is 72, a few years behind the developed world. The country certainly has its problems, which I think it's doing its best to resolve. One of the biggest issues it faces is racial tensions between the indigenous-Fijians and the Indo-Fijians. When the country gained its independence from the British in 1970, the Indo-Fijians wanted equal rights and privileges, while the indigenous Fijians were concerned about protecting their customary lands and communal life. We got a sense for this communal life when we visited a primarily Indo-Fijian market today. A lady saw us eyeing t...

We've been in Fiji for a few days now and we're starting to get to know a few things about another country. This is the first time we've visited a tropical place and rented a car at the same time. This has given us much more freedom to explore the area than if we just stayed at an all encompassing resort, something we tend to do for March breaks when we go to Mexico or the Dominion Republic with the kids. We're staying for a week at a place near Nadia town. It's a separate house next to the owner Lynn's place, a British lady who is married to a Fijian. It's a nice enough place with a pool. There's no air conditioning, but luckily the nights are cool. It does heat up to 30 degrees Celsius during the day pretty quickly though, so we make use of the pool often to stay cool. I can see why Fiji is a famous vacation location that everyone seems to have heard of. The weather is near perfect with a warm ocean and cool breezes. The people are friendly and we...

We drove from Thames along The Firth of Thames bay to Auckland . Here we stayed at a place north of Auckland for two nights and then spent two nights in downtown Auckland before flying out for Fiji on Saturday morning. The bed and breakfast north of Auckland had a great view of the bay. The owner, Rod, had built a pathway down a steep slope through the trees to a common path that led to the sandy beach below. Catheleen and I walked the path strewn with broken shells, and it was great to stroll the beach and look at the houses on the beach front and surrounding tan coloured cliffs. The place has a few big and modern houses, something we haven't seen much of throughout most of New Zealand. It's not surprising since this is New Zealand's only true big city with a population of 1.4 million. One in three New Zealanders lives in Auckland. For whatever reason, tensions exists between Aucklanders and the rest of New Zealand, especially the further south you go. The term JAFA for...