Sailing the South Seas – Final

Island Hopping

I’m catching up about 12 days of our trip with this final chapter. Although I had a lot of time aboard the ship, I always found something better to do than writing updates on my blog. I’m writing most of this at our hotel in Fiji, where we’re staying for a few days after finishing our cruise, where we were for the past 15 days.

On our cruise, we visited many islands in French Polynesia where we started in Tahiti, then the Cook Islands, one stop in Tonga and finally four islands in Fiji and we disembarked at the port of Lautoka, here in Fiji.

As is often the case on the small ships that are what Windstar is all about, we usually stop at many small islands and in most cases, there were only about 50 people from the ship that we’d ever see around the towns. A few of the islands we visited only had a few hundred or thousand inhabitants. The island of Rarotonga, Cook Islands, where we visited a long time ago, had definitely grown since our last visit but it largely had maintained the same charm that we first experienced. Rarotonga is one of the places that we both agreed would have a much longer followup trip.

Sea Legs

In my last post I made mention of us wearing an anti-seasickness device on our wrists. About halfway through our cruise, both of us stopped wearing them. It’s not that they didn’t work and definitely not because the ship no longer going through rough seas. Most days while out sea, passengers had to hold the walls when walking the hallways.

We tried it out for a few days and realized we must have gotten used to the ship rocking back and forth as we sailed the South Pacific ocean in between our destinations. I mentioned several times over the years that Barb and I have historically been very not done well in rough seas so not having any patches behind our ears or these new wrist devices is new ground for us.

Despite the rough seas between ports, it appeared to have little affect on any of the passengers, including us, from doing any day to day activities and it always remained nice sunny weather and just enough humidity to be comfortable in the evenings.

The Mountain and the Water

Compared to other cruises, Barb and I didn’t book as many exclusions compared to previous cruises. One of the first islands we stopped at, Bora Bora, we were supposed to be on a cycling tour which we both looked forward to, especially how spectacular Bora Bora is. Sadly, this one excursion got cancelled for unknown reasons.

The most memorable excursion to me was on the Fijian island of Vanua Levu. We drove about 90 minutes to the base of this mountain, hiked up to a waterfall and swam in the pool at the base of the waterfall. We both wore our bathing suits in anticipation of this but everyone in our group was shocked that we planned to swim in the water. It was refreshing getting into the water after the long hike but it was easily the coldest water I have ever been in.

At the End

Being on such a small cruise ship, about 275 passengers, you get to know a lot of the fellow passengers over a 15 day cruise and it’s always a bit sad when the cruise comes to an end. Most of the ports that we had stopped at were picturesque and all except the very last at Lautoka, Fiji where the view from our cabin was an active container shipping port. On the last full day, a number of Fijian dancers came to the ship and it was surreal, seeing them in their traditional outfits, singing and dancing with shipping containers nearby.

And Finally …

Barb and I leave our hotel here in Fiji tomorrow and we will overnight in Aukland before flying home on Monday. We’ve covered a lot of geography over the past 3 weeks. It’s hard to say when we will return to the south seas in the future. We have another cruise booked for later this year and as always have several ideas on the go. We have cousins in both Australia and Sri Lanka that we would love to see again. It’s been a great experience seeing all of the unique Polynesian cultures and we’ll both take home a lot of great memories.

By now, all of my photos from our south seas trip will be up on my photo website.

Baden