Fiji loves an ear infection

“this too shall pass”

“this too shall pass”

This was the mantra that I repeated over and over to myself as I lay in a shack on a remote island in Fiji with a raging ear infection. For the first time in my 8 months of travel I was regretting traveling alone. I was three days into my stay at the gorgeous Octopus resort on Waya Island in the Yasawa chain of islands in Fiji. Waya is everything that tropical postcards, calendars and computer backdrops depict: as in white sand, stunning coral and azure water. Not that I was really getting the benefit of any of that from my perch in the fetal position. I certainly couldn’t swim; felt revolted by the idea of baking in the sun and couldn’t swallow without pain, let alone sip away at coconut milk cocktails. In short, I was in a bad way.

How exactly did it come to this?

Although you might not have readily surmised this from my 3 month absence from blogging, I have been in Australia, specifically Sydney, where I spent a solid two and a half months working to repay my travel debts. There was nothing so fascinating about the work, just a typical restaurant job as a waitress, although it was incredible to really live on the other side of the world for a bit. And live is what I did. I had a job, a gym routine and a family. And oh what a family! I was staying with my aunty ma and cousin Janis, whom I love to bits, but rarely get to see. As well I got to connect with my mom’s side of the family. Cousin Archie and the rest of the Arenson gang: Elana, Bess, Belinda and my little cuzzies Dani, Sam and Mikaela! Oh and of course who can forget the fact that BOTH of my grannies were in town: Granny Gertie for Pesach and Granny Dor for a jol. So anyways after a solid amount of time living and working I dedicated the last ten days of my trip to Australia’s east coast. This was too short of a time by any estimate, but as anyone who has been to Australia knows, nothing about oz is cheap. I broke my trip down into two priorities: surfing and diving. If you may recall I had certified for my Padi open water diving while in Plettinburg bay, South Africa. As for surfing, it was just something I had always wanted to try, but preferably not in freezing cold water. So I did the Mojo surf camp from Sydney up to Byron Bay. I originally signed up for the 4-day camp, but ended up extending my time to 5 days because I loved it so much. To drive from Sydney to Byron would take 12 hours. On the first day we drove 6 up to this gorgeous little surf shack right on the beach. Then we had our first whack at the surf, as the sun was setting and the moon rising in the dusk of the day. It was pretty romantic, but we also got absolutely pummeled. For the beginner, a significant aspect of surfing is understanding how to hold your board so that a wave doesn’t crash it into you. Anyways over the next couple of days we showed significant improvement in this field. As well we managed to actually get up on our boards, which is no small feat. We stayed two nights at the little surf camp and then drove another 3 hours north to Coffs Harbour where we stayed at a larger camp with different tour groups integrated. Here we worked on the next skill to master, which was paddling and learning to catch our own waves. Two nights flew by and then it was another 3 hours to Byron where we all went out on Friday night. At this point I felt quite close to my group and was quite sad when it came time for me to bus to Brisbane the next day, as I had a flight up to Cairns.

Cairns sucks. It’s way touristy and not at all as cool as Byron. But my live aboard experience was really impressive. I stayed on this boat called Reef Encounter that’s stationed out on the Great Barrier Reef. To get to it you take a transfer boat. It was on this boat that I met Courtney and Ben, two likeminded twenty-year olds from Southern California. We struck up a quick friendship and were thrilled to find out that we were sharing a room on the boat. The next three days were filled with diving, eating and hot tubing. Essentially we would wake up, dive, sit in the hot tub and talk about food and then eat. And repeat. We did 3-4 dives a day including two night dives! And that brings us to the aforementioned ear infection, which undoubtedly was a result of all that time underwater. The day after my live aboard concluded I flew back to Sydney and the next day onwards to Fiji.