Exploring the city

After spending the night on an incredibly hard thin mattress that gave us so many flashbacks to our time in China, we woke up ready to explore Suva. However coffee was definitely on our mind! Our first stop for the day was to the national museum of Fiji which initially didn't look like it would amount to much as we entered a single room but to our pleasant surprise there was a door to the side which led to a gift shop and many over exhibition rooms almost quadrupling the size we thought the museum was initially. It was a bit of a mishmash through and there was no clear history given as to how Fiji was discovered or cultivated, which was a shame. You assume museums abroad would go back to the very beginning and outline the basics of how that country was established but then you remember that very few museums in our own country go in to that much background detail. It feels wrong therefore to expect over country's museums to do this. All knowleged out and with coffee in our bellies we began to walk into the city centre of Suva. Our taxi had driven through this area yesterday so we knew it wasn't too far away from where we are staying, or the museum, which is good because our accommodation host suggested we needed to get a taxi into town. What a waste of money that would have been and we would have also missed out on seeing some of the sights of the city such as the presidential buildings and their surrounding gardens and greenery. Like Nadi the centre of Suva is chaotic and full of scams. We instantly stand out from the crowd and we completely had our guard up for anyone who approached us. Luckily I'd read online about one particular scam where you will be approached by someone asking all out you and as soon as they find out your name they start carving it on to something wooden which they then insist you buy. This almost happened to us until I insisted the guy didn't carve our names into this ugly wooden sword but he kept saying it was a gift and we wouldn't need to pay. In the end I just said I knew he was scamming us and off we walked. We found safety within malls knowing there was security around and we used them as a base to check the maps on our phones to where we were visiting next. Along our way we came across Ellery Street, it would be so cool to find out how exactly this street earned such a great name. Suva is an odd city in the sense that it has this amazing old architecture which is so detailed and intricute but alongside this are buildings that are pretty much falling apart. It's an odd mixture but there is a certain charm to the city especially in the older and greener parts. We ended our day with a meal in a food court at the top of the most expensive looking mall around. Vegetarian was hard to come by but the vegetable fried rice we had went down a treat.Read more