Suva 2018

Suva is the capital city of Fiji.  As such, this is a busy and crowded place.  Such a contrast to most of the rest of Fiji.  Surprisingly, since the main international airport is located in Denerau almost 3 hours away, many tourists who visit Fiji, never see the capital.

Last year this was the place we went for Shelley's Gallbladder surgery and this is where I saw the dentist.  While we were in Tarawa, I lost a filling and learned that there is no dentist anywhere in Kiribati!  We tried to use a "temporary filling" from our medical kit. but it only lasted a few days.

So for the last month, I have just sucked it up until we could get to Suva.  As it turns out, I broke another tooth a few weeks later, so seeing the dentist became even more imperative.

In most 2nd and third world countries, dental care is usually limited to tooth extraction.  Primitive, but it works...  Fortunately here in Suva is the Stewart Street Dental Clinic, where Dr. Singh and his staff have all the latest dental equipment and all the skills necessary to fix most dental problems.  This prices here are also about a third of what they cost at home!

In the end, I needed 2 crowns and a root canal!  He was able to to one of the crowns and half the root canal now and we will come back (by bus) at the end of the month to finish up the root canal and get the second crown.  This whole adventure will cost us about $2600 FJ (or about $1300 US).  Not only that, he has a CNC machine right in the office that makes the crowns while you wait!  Every other dentist in Fiji must send the file to China to have the crowns made making people wait 4-6 weeks... At the same time he gave Shelley a check up, X rays, and a cleaning for $150 FJ ($75 US)!

Shelley met a Lady who make purses.  We negotiated a good price on 3 of these and will sell them when we get home to raise money for Right to Write.

We also found a lady in the Central Market who was willing to make us 500 more pencil cases for our Right to Write work...  In less than a week she was done and we are VERY happy with the results!  If we raise enough money in Canada we will have her make some more before we leave!

When we were in Vuda Point we tried to get our carburator for the 15hp Yamaha engine fixed.  Al we could do was find out that the only Yamaha dealer in Fiji doesn't stock them and it would be 4-6 weeks for them to get one in for $600fj.... After hearing this we decided to wait until we got home and buy one there.  On a whim, I called the only outboard repair place in Suva who didn't specialize, and asked if he could have a look at it.  He agreed, and on Saturday afternoon we met Francis at his shop and in less than 40 minutes he repaired our carburetor and asked the grand total of $25  FJ!  He is our new hero!

He runs a BUSY shop!

The night before we left Suva, we were invited to a friends boat, SV Amarula, where Eric and Lynne fed us a wonderful chicken dinner.  the only catch was we could only visit at high tide as they were half hauled out of the water, when something broke and are now stuck half way up the ramp!  Like all things in Fiji, it will work out for them, it will just be on Fijian time...

About 10 miles from Suva we saw a ketch washed up on a reef!  We reported it and only later learned that it was wrecked some time ago...  It might be a good idea to mark known wrecks like that somehow so it doesn't keep getting reported...

As I write this, we are sailing west along the south shore of Viti Levu, the main Fijian Island, back to the west side where we will spend the rest of our time before we put the boat on the hard and fly home to Canada.