Fidji: There's two sides to every story...

First of all, as it has been a major event worldwide (and for that was "on our way" also), we'd like to pay a short tribute to the King of Pop, the late Michael Jackson. Whatever character flaws he may have had, whatever he did wrong in his life, you just can't help it to salute to man with such incredible musical talent and devotion. May he now find the peace (and the right colour of skin) that he couldn't get up until his death...
Well, and with that we'll gon back to business.

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Fidji... yeah, take that word in, let it make another round through your brain... yes, can you see the pictures coming all by themselves? What's there left to describe with mere words? ;-)
Well, whatever paradise-like pictures you have in mind of when thinking of Fidji, we can definitely confirm all of them. The pure beauty of the Fidji islands is just as real as all the other clischés about it (and about all the other South Pacific paradise-like islands, for that matter): The amazing beaches, the friendly locals, flowers in their hair and Hawaii-Shirts on (actually, are they called Fidji-shirts here?!), the typical kind of weird, but nevertheless nice Fidji music with guitars, ukulele and beautiful singing.
Following the advice of all the Fidji-travellers that we have met so far on our journey, we left the main island Viti Levu as soon as possibe and started some serious island hopping through the Yasawa islands, Fidji's main tourist destination. For that regard it is of course pretty touristy, however, there is of course a reason to it that most of the people visiting Fidji come to the Yasawas instead of going on one of the other over 300 Fidjian islands: The Yasawas offer you the kind of stunning beauty you comee looking for in Fidji, there's tons of rather cheap accomodation and getting around is fairly easy and not too expensive compared to the flights or day-long ferry cruises that are necessary to reach some of the other Fidjian islands.
The Yasawas, that means on the one hand the most beautiful side of Fidji: Dreamy sandy beaches with more shades of turquois in one square meter of water than in all the other beaches of the world combined; scenic vulcanic islands and corall reefs; tiny islands that are hardly more than a round beach with a palm tree forest in the middel; etc. However, our "vacation from travelling" also revealed the not so nice sides of Fidji to us which became especially apparent when the weather won't let you go explore the beaches and reefs mentioned above. Because those are the times when you sit in your tiny bungalow dorm or the common room and suddenly realize the really low standards of pretty much everything in some of the ressorts: almost primitive accomodation, hardly more "luxurious" than camping, really bad food (and you don't have a choice on the islands, if you don't wanna starve you have to eat in the ressort!), the Fidjian wildlife you really didn't want to encounter, from huge cockroaches to equally huge rats and spiders, etc. So you enjoy all of those sitting around uselessly, playing cards or writing diary while outside mean winds and rain threaten to rip apart the house you're in.
On top of that, I (Matthias) got some, hm, let's call them "digestional problems", shall we, after a couple of days and went back to the main island to at least be in some sort of civilization in case it would get worse. Lukas stayed on the islands and eventually this meant our premature split-up: Because first Lukas postponed his return from the islands, then later on I postponed my general departure from Fidji and due to the lack of proper communication means our goodbyes after six months of travelling together just happened by accident: He was on his way from one of the ressorts to the ferry, I was on my way from the ferry to another ressort, a couple of short sentences screamed across the water and that was it, c ya, have fun.
During the next couple of days I continued travelling through the Yasawas, while Lukas was already on his way to the airport to fly to LA when we said goodbye that day. Judging by the increasingly dark sky I could count myself lucky being the one leaving the ferry and not have to spend some seven hours more on it. But that's another story that's best told by Lukas himself :-)