To our family and friends,
Last night we enjoyed our first sunset in yesterday from the patio of our Bure (guest house) in Taveuni, Fiji. The days, weeks, months and even years of planning have come to this, our beginning of Travelers 3. We have built a small blog for our travels, www.travelers3.com, where we will share our voyage. The site is now up, but please understand if some links and things don’t yet work right. We have been more focused on moving and packing these last few months. It has been a race of 12 to 18 hour days working to move, prepare for this trip and make the plane to Fiji. I hope to spend some time cleaning up the site soon, but adventures await and internet access is scarce in this corner of the World.
We decided on the name Travelers 3 as a family, since we have three voices to share on this trip. Kimberly, Tanner and I will each be posting our stories, and I expect in many places our stories will be unique to each of us. We are excited to share them, and I am incredibly happy that Tanner will be blogging as well. He has an amazing way of seeing details in the world. So welcome to our world. We hope you enjoy it.
Thanks!
Travelers 3
Kimberly, Topher and Tanner Croddy
www.travelers3:com
Our First Sunset in Yesterday
(Taveuni Island, Fiji, Nakia Dive and Resort – 16.77 deg South 179.97 deg West)
The Sun set early our first night, as the shortened days in the Southern Hemisphere pulled the Sun behind low islands lightly shrouded in low clouds across the Somosomo strait to the North just before 6 p.m.
Taveuni is a unique island. It sits on both sides of the international dateline at 180 degrees longitude. We are staying in the upper right corner of the island at Nakia, a 10 acre bit of paradise run by Robin and Jim, two Americans from Capitola, California who moved here 17 years ago to build this dream resort. Their daughter Julie built the diving business just below us which offers some of the best diving in the world. The resort is gorgeous, and we are blessed to be here. It runs on solar and wind, and most of what we eat comes from the farm on the property. All the fruits, vegetables, breads and more are made or grown on site. It is hard to overstate how special we feel to be here. The resort only can accommodate 12 guests, but today we are the only guests, so all of the staff have made it their mission to take extra special care of us.
Because we straddle the dateline things get confusing. The right side of the island is the most “West” spot in the world and the left side of the island is the most “East” spot in the world. Each day in the world starts and ends here. The picture of us attached is at the dateline. Kimberly is in today, while I am 24 hours behind her in yesterday. Tanner is standing over the dateline in a weird bit of time traveling, with his feet 24 hours apart.
Fiji operates entirely in the new day, but Since our resort is in the western (right) side of the island, technically the sunset we watched was in yesterday. It was beautiful to see and served as a metaphor for where we have come in our lives, taking a step backwards to try to capture more of life and really see the days.
Today is Kimberly’s birthday. To celebrate, we arose with the Sun and went diving with Julie to the Great White Wall in Rainbow Reef. The wall drops 100 meters straight down – which Julie knows because some crazy Fijian dove to the bottom and told her the depth. The top is full of the most colorful soft corals you can imagine mashed together with hundreds of species of fish. Starting at about 75 feet, the wall drops away straight down in a field of whiteish lavender soft coral that gives the wall its name. We had the most amazing dive of our lives, seeing octopus, clown trigger fish, magic coral that changes from brown to white when you touch it and more. At our second dive, we floated in the current like superheroes across the reef top.
To cap it off, when we got back on the boat, the crew and fellow divers joined in to sing happy birthday to Kimberly. As I write this, Kimberly is enjoying a massage from the patio of our Bure while a soft rain falls in this rain forest we are calling home today. Tanner and I are at the lodge above doing schoolwork and writing while the kitchen staff next door are listening to local music while baking a coconut cake for Kimberly for dinner. I must admit this is the best way I can imagine to decompress from all the effort of the last several months to wrap things up at NeoTract for me, school for Tanner, and packing up the home, as well as saying goodbye to family and friends.
Thank you all for joining us as we take this “giant stride entry” into our new life. We are just starting to feel at home being on the road and I cannot thank Kimberly enough for booking Nakia as our first stop. It is truly spectacular. We will post more soon.
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