TUESDAY, JANUARY 29

Ni sa yadra (good morning)! It was windy and rainy all night long. Our gardens are covered in downed vegetation and the hotel has gone on their own private generator. No water throughout the hotel, almost the whole island has lost power and along with it, their community water supply! Right after we woke up, everything in the hotel went dark. Reception told us that they shut their generator down for an hour to let it cool down….breakfast would be delayed and please let them know if we needed buckets of water so we could flush our toilet!

Apparently Cyclone Gene made landfall early this morning on the north side of Viti Levu, not too far from Nadi. The morning paper tells us Vanua Levu (just to the northeast of Viti Levu) suffered the brunt of the storm with many trees down, homes & plantations damaged, but that the storm should be to the west of us by mid-day today. Trees and power lines are down all over the island. Our chef is having his staff use water from the swimming pool to wash dishes and breakfast was everything “cold-style”. They did find some gallons of bottled water to use to heat for tea and instant coffee. They are providing all guests with bottled Fiji Water for drinking.

The weather is still cloudy but warm and a bit breezy, with some drizzling mist, nothing like the sheets of rain from last evening. It looks like our day today will be spent under the covered verandahs reading our books! Needless to say, no dive boats are venturing out today even though the ocean looks almost calm….can you imagine what that storm must have churned up down there???? And our beach has had sand thrown every which way!

The major concerns here are the Fijian villages. Traditionally, the villages are built along the many rivers that flow down from the mountains into the ocean. With all the rain that the storm brought, rivers are cresting and threatening to flood. I heard over the radio this morning that they don’t expect the rivers to start receding until maybe Saturday. One of our waitresses told me that if the villages threaten to flood, the villagers will take shelter in either their community buildings or in local churches.

We’ll wait a while today, to let them get some tree clearing done, but we’ll venture out to see what it looks like out there….more later!