Taveuni, Fiji: Getting There and Back

I was glad to see that when Fiji reopened, there was still a direct flight from SFO to Nadi.  This greatly simplifies going to Fiji.  We still had to get to Taveuni, though it seemed relatively straightforward as flights to other islands in Fiji go.  There were two or three flights a day that lined up reasonably nicely with the flights from/to SFO.  The flight to Taveuni took about an hour and a half, and then we were picked up in a pickup truck for the hour-long drive to the resort.  The second half of the drive is over a bumpy road, but it was not too bad.

On the way there, the hop over to Taveuni was a bit delayed, and the communication of what was going on was pretty terrible.  But everyone on any of the small flights leaving Nadi was sitting in one room, and they kept claiming they were going to get us all out of there shortly, and every now and then they'd call a flight number, and eventually they did get us all out of there.  It was a little stormy on the flight over, which was a tiny bit terrifying, but Rob slept through the whole thing.

Aside from that, the travel itself was pretty uneventful in both directions.  On the way back, we moved our flight to Nadi earlier in the morning, because we had to get COVID tests at the airport in Nadi, and we could not get a straight answer on when the test facility was open.  So we flew back to Nadi in the morning, got our tests (which were miraculously negative), and then had to hang out at the airport all day.  But it was not too bad of a place to hang around all day.  Unfortunately we could not checkin more than 4 hours before the flight, so we couldn't go to the lounge.

The one other hitch in our travel was that when we got back to SFO, it took 3 hours for the bags from our plane to make it out to the carousel.  This is not an exaggeration, it was literally 3 hours.  Apparently the shitty little contractor that Fiji Airways uses to unload luggage had covid-related staffing problems.

Anyhoo, the travel was not too painful overall.  The long haul flight on the way there had excellent service (and the one on the way back was just fine).