{"id":6795,"date":"2025-07-02T09:09:11","date_gmt":"2025-07-02T08:09:11","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/hoarde.net\/craigblog\/?p=6795"},"modified":"2025-07-02T09:09:58","modified_gmt":"2025-07-02T08:09:58","slug":"garden-of-the-sleeping-giant","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/hoarde.net\/craigblog\/?p=6795","title":{"rendered":"Garden of the Sleeping Giant"},"content":{"rendered":"\n

This was my one Official tourist thing of the trip. The hotel were really keen on booking stuff for me, because I don’t think they really understood the idea of a “do nothing & wander around’ sort of holiday, but all their offerings were tour packages which … Didn’t really work for me.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

I know they were trying to help, but what might actually have helped in my specific case is being able to look at the brochures & get an idea of what appealed. Can’t do that if someone immediately leaps in with helpful suggestions.<\/em><\/p>\n\n\n\n

Anyway<\/strong>, I looked up the Garden of the Sleeping Giant, found they had a website and a transport+entry option, so I went for that. There was a tour option which included the garden, but it cost twice as much for less time on-site, and included a bunch of other stuff that I didn’t care about.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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The system seems almost Southeast Asian in the “it’ll work out” approach. I’d assumed when I booked and specified location and time that they had some sort of bus pick up system going, but instead it was just a car with a driver, who then went to pick up another visitor from another hotel a bit further down the beach by just driving down the beach because it was quicker than going around the roads. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

I got a little bit suspicious when he asked how much I was paying for the whole trip, and then asked that I pay him that money, so I delayed things until we were in the Gardens themselves, just in case this was the scam that it really really sounded like. Turn down it wasn’t; I have no idea how the money side of it works.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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On the way back down from the lookout I discovered that very dry volcanic soil is extremely slippery to walk on<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n\n\n\n
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Some kind of fungus on a log<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n\n\n\n
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This was my one Official tourist thing of the trip. The hotel were really keen on booking stuff for me, because I don’t think they really understood the idea of a “do nothing & wander around’ sort of holiday, but all their offerings were tour packages which … Didn’t really work for me. I know […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false},"categories":[175],"tags":[110,114],"class_list":["post-6795","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-holiday-2025","tag-fiji","tag-gardens"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p3O6N9-1LB","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/hoarde.net\/craigblog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/6795","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/hoarde.net\/craigblog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/hoarde.net\/craigblog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/hoarde.net\/craigblog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/hoarde.net\/craigblog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=6795"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/hoarde.net\/craigblog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/6795\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":6797,"href":"https:\/\/hoarde.net\/craigblog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/6795\/revisions\/6797"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/hoarde.net\/craigblog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=6795"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/hoarde.net\/craigblog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=6795"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/hoarde.net\/craigblog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=6795"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}