Today is Diwali. This is the Hindu festival of lights and a Fijian national holiday. 40% of the population of Fiji is Indian, brought in over a century ago by the British to work the sugar cane plantation. Don't feel sorry for them, they're doing just fine. Anyway, for Diwali, people string lights (like Christmas) and shoot off fireworks (like the 4th of July). But these are not the carefully orchestrated and highly regulated fireworks like back home. No, this is a fireworks free-for all. A maelstrom of pyrotechnics that before now, would have been hard for me to imagine. EVERYONE is shooting off fireworks. From our boat we can see in 360 degrees many dozens of individual celebrations. I feel like we are in the middle of a battle zone. In fact there are so many more fireworks going off further in the distance they are flashing in the clouds like one of those post-apocalyptic syfi movies. I'm tempted to bust out the flare gun just to defend ourselves. Those of you who know Wendy can imagine how delighted she is. I probably should have bought her some fireworks. All the stores sell them like candy. Now I know why! We did go to an Indian restaurant (The Indigo - I kid you not) for lunch today, which was delicious but really spicy, which I enjoyed all afternoon.

We've actually been on a mooring here in Port Denarau for nearly 2 weeks. In that time we've enjoyed some of the restaurants, hiked to a few geocaches, and bused into Nadi town for groceries and hardware. I've also done a few boat projects including the installation of a diesel heater (it'll be cold in NZ). This is really a great place to stay with a lot to see and do. It seems like we've been busy every day and still haven't seen everything we wanted to. Wendy was quite disappointed we didn't go to the mud baths or get the Cows with Guns (wtf?) geocache. Oh well, maybe next year....

Perhaps all of this Diwali is a fitting sendoff as Bang Bang Bangorang will be clearing out of Fiji tomorrow, bound for Opua, New Zealand. This is an 1100 mile passage nearly due south to approx. latitude 35 S. We've engaged a NZ weather guru to help us plan our voyage since it requires a bit of ziggity-zaggity to dodge assorted weather systems. Today he presented us with a solid plan which tomorrow we will pull the trigger on. We'll try to update this blog at sea, but cannot post pictures because of the narrow bandwidth on the sat phone. I hope you can follow along as we sail the final leg of our cruise across the Pacific.