There’s a bunch I could write about travel planning, and anxiety about travelling, and the things that haven’t gone right so far, but I wanted to write something positive. Maybe I’ll put something in later, backdated to provide the seamless blogging experience you’ve come to expect.
I felt oddly calm, despite some 5am non-sleeping due to my mind racing to come up with steadily more ridiculous things to worry about. My suspicion is that the calmness came from “there’s nothing more I can do at this point except follow the plan”.
I had a horrifyingly new rental car, and returned it out by the airport, ironically coming the closest to damaging it I’d ever been in the rental depot carpark, squeezing between a car being picked up & the airport shuttle. No damage, and they were happy with it, so all good there.
Me being me, I was at the airport ridiculously early, an hour before check-in, so I got breakfast & mooched around for a bit before joining the check in line. The slow moving check in line. That I was in for 45 minutes as it meandered towards the desks.
“Why didn’t I check in online?” was a popular refrain, and I have no answers for you.
But check in eventually happened, and was fine. Security screening was fine, and the flight, despite being “Full” according to the announcements, was not; I could have moved to a window seat if I’d wanted to, but I’d been randomly assigned an aisle, and I was OK with that. ( I’m not going to pay to select a seat for a three hour flight with no views other than ocean )
It was a good flight, with no significant turbulence. Watched a few episodes of the Night Court sequel (?), which were fun, half an episode of a cartoon I’d never heard of called Fired On Mars, which seemed like it’d be a “this guy’s life sucks” sort of comedy, and most of an episode of Person Of Interest. Didn’t really feel like reading.
Fiji Border Control was a much shorter line than last time, maybe because it was a smaller plane; the line fit comfortably within the barrier tapes this time, and didn’t stretch back to the outside of the building. You can’t tell from the picture, but those are Fijian ceiling tiles.
I’d been clever and decorated my bag with bright green tape on the handles to make it easier to spot on the conveyor, and it really does work. I then negated my cleverness by misunderstanding directions given and almost walking past security screening, because what I interpreted as “go down that walkway beside the turned-off scanner” was in fact “put your bags in the scanner which will start when you do so”. They were fine about the mistake, so it must happen regularly.
I’d planned to just walk to the hotel, because it was close by, but it turned out they have a free shuttle. I was checking my phone to be sure I knew where to go, someone asked which hotel I was going to, then pointed out the guy holding the sign for that hotel, wearing the shirt of that hotel, and who called for a taxi van with the hotel name on it. I figured that if it was a scam, they were spectacularly well organised.
The Tokatoka Resort is laid out with multiple small clusters of ‘rooms’, with walkways linking them, so there’s one other room in ‘my’ building. It’s taking advantage of the green space, and must get interesting when it rains, because only the walkway is covered, not the connection to the individual rooms.
I’m only here for the one night, but I did at least have a beer at the poolside bar.
