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One year with no football! How will they survive?
We decided to come to Levuka, which is on the Island of Ovalau because we heard good reviews about the place. Its the old capital so we knew it'd be well historic and show different side of fiji to the usual beaches.
Levuka was a mission to get to from Nananu-I-Ra, after leaving there by boat to get back to Viti-Levu (The Main Island), we had to walk over a mile with our bags to some shanty bus stop that was buzzing with flies! luckily we made it just in time for the Vatakoula Express bus to get to us. That took us two and a half hours to get to the village of Korovou, mainly because the Kings Road was certainly not fit to bear that name...it was covered with dirt and in some parts it was sheer mud and only one lane of it as well! so if a car was coming in another direction, there had to be some mad negotiation in Fijian (which sounds like MCing at a crazy drum n bass night) as to who gets past! After getting to Korovou, we had to wait for five hours for the bus to Levuka. We tried for literally the whole 5 hours to establish which one of the 2 bus stops it stopped at, however, half the people we asked told us a different stop to the other half so we decided to stand half way between the stops and when the bus came, we had to run with our heavy bags to the bus.
On the bus, NO JOKE, there were five prisoners on their way to Levuka...on a normal civilian bus! This was because the bus came from the Capital Suva, where the main High Court is, and we took it that Levuka was the only free prison at the time. The bus took us for one hour to the port and we had to get a bus to the island of Ovalau, where Levuka was. Anyway, on this boat, the prisoners were allowed to walk around in their hand-cuffs and they were in very high spirits! STRANGE!
When we got to the Island of Ovalau, a torrential downpour started! it took us about an hour and a half to get to the "city" of Levuka (pop 2000), when we did get there we got a taxi to our hotel, oblivious to the fact that it was only a 2 minute walk! however, it was raining and the journey only cost 50p...and he ripped us off! The Royal Levuka hotel, where we stayed is the oldest hotel in the South Pacific, and has received glowing reviews by numerous tourists in the past! ! We got to our room and it was so oldschool words could not express it! The window was one of those ones that you had to heave open manually! so it didnt have any glass!
The next day, we decided to explore the delights of Levuka, We went to the tourist office for some suggestions as to what to do, however, they were closing their office, and were not very helpful! It was at this point that we decided to cut our stay here by 5 days! We deduced that there was really nothing to do here at all! it was painful how boring it was!
'Fiji time' was longer than it has been anywhere else infiji here, basically means they can take as long as they want doing the most menial tasks and there is nothing you can do about it, its just very carefree! However, the girl that was mainly in charge of meals in the 'restaurant' had the most sour puss you had ever seen! it was rotten to look at her, it was as if someone had died and they forced her to come to work!
We tries to change our flight to New Zealand we were told we had to go directly to Suva to the Qantas office to change it! Basically, we successfully changed the hotel at least, because after one night we despised it! Our final day here was yet another one of sheer boredom! We went on a walk around the town and managed to complete all the attractions suggested by the hotel in about 40 minutes! We met some English med students at the hotel that unfortunately were subjected to a month in this lovely town and a month in the hotel!
For dinner, we decided to follow the advice of the Levuka online guide and go to the Ovalau Holiday Resort for dinner! This was about a 20 minute taxi ride out of town down some dark, bendy and bumpy roads! The setting was immaculate, but the dining experience we were about to have ranks amongst the worst we have endured! We had to wait about an hour for our food to arrive! When Cess's dish came, it was the wrong one, she had asked for prawns in lemon and butter, but got prawn curry instead! Dubs's Pork curry was alright at first, but after a few mouthfulls, he noticed the large amount of pork fat inside and badly cooked veggies! When Cess's correct dish finally came, it was disgusting, what made it worse were that the prawns were actually good! The restaurant owners agreed to drive us back to our hotel, and when they did, we gave them no money for their troubles! The meal was about $40...basically about 12 quid! but that is very expensive by Fijian standards, and we could not express how bad it was!
Our final night here we got no sleep at all! Our mosquito bites were itching us so much that it made it almost impossible to sleep, however, what disgusted us immensely where the large population of bed bugs we saw in the bed! There were definitely over 10! it was disgusting! The thing we noticed about our room as soon as we walked in was that it looked clean, however, it was far from it with closer scrutiny! so we decided to brave it and stay up till our bus at 5am on Monday! We showered, left the room and waited in the vast lobby. The oldness of the hotel added to the eerieness of it! We could constantly hear footsteps, therefore we did not get any sleep at all and we were getting bitten loads by mosquitoes!
On reflection, we could see why Levuka attracted many tourists but only the older ones! It is a nice place to come and relax and do nothing! Or if you are very religious you can go to church loads! As there is literally about 1 church for every 20 people! Other than that you can literally do everything Levuka has to offer in about 2 hours! The fact that there is only one arrival and departure of public transport means that you can't go there for a day trip either! In conclusion, we generally recommend sticking to the Yasawas and not coming here! Sorry if we have offended anyone that came here and really liked it! but we didn't
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