The port of Suva is a dual purpose freight and cruise ship port, and, while some green and verdant hills can be seen surrounding the harbor in the distance, it’s not the prettiest city when viewed from water. Or land. With a population of around 250,000, it is a town with shockingly bad traffic and sidewalks choked with pedestrians and markets.
I felt a cold coming on last evening and slept very poorly. In a cruise ship cabin, when one person sleeps fitfully, chances are the other person does too, and we were slow to get moving this morning and lingered over breakfast on the Terrace Deck (the weather was sunny and hot and breezy).
It was 10:30am or so when we finally left the ship, having first mailed a few cards with the Fiji post office employees that set up a table in the Piazza and sold stamps and post cards. That saved us a stop while in town. We took a free shuttle to a shopping mall (think tall, not wide, as it was small but four stories high) just a few blocks from the ship, and from there walked around Suva a bit, in search of the Botanic Gardens (finally found them), but it was hot and crowded and the sidewalks were covered with mangos (really...it is mango season, and everyone brought the harvest from their trees to sell to other people who were doing the exact same thing, displaying thousands of them on tarps lining the streets).
Mango selling, Fiji style. We returned to the mall where we did find 15 minutes of free WiFi and booked the flights and updated the few apps before the time expired. It was hot and crowded there, too, and though we considered having lunch in the mall’s food court, nothing really appealed. We were back on the ship by 2:30pm.
It was actually a little too warm to have lunch on the Terrace Deck this afternoon, so we ate inside the Horizon Court Buffet and watched all the freight operations happening right next to the ship in the port. I tried to nap a little before dinner, but, unsurprisingly, did not. At 5pm the production show vocalists did a few songs from Motor City in the Piazza (we couldn’t miss that!), and following that we went right into dinner in the Bernini Dining Room (ceviche, fruit kabob and vegetarian curry spicy enough to temporarily open my nasal passages).
Once again, we had two different shows to choose from tonight. We haven’t had this much entertainment variety on a Princess ship in several years and we are really enjoying it. We skipped dessert and made it to the 6:45pm Vista Lounge show by Australian variety team Pearson and Harvey and then (huge excitement about this one) we were still able to get two seats in the Princess Theater for the 7:45pm performance of Mercury Rising starring Steve Larkins, a tribute to Freddie Mercury and the music of Queen. I loved it. He had Freddie Mercury’s mannerisms and flamboyance (and teeth) mastered, and that music...fantastic!
There are many more things happening around the ship every night, but we aren’t often seeing it. For example, Quest was taking place tonIght, and we’ve loved that on Royal Caribbean (I do think the entertainment is a little racier here in Australia. Certainly the comedians have been). Our plan is that, when the shows start getting repetitious, we’ll spend our evenings listening to the several live bands on board and attending things like Quest, but we’re still enjoying the shows too much. It’s an abundance of entertainment riches, for sure.