With three keen foodies along for the ride it's not surprising that much of our girls' week exploring Fiji revolved around eating and drinking.
A cooking lesson at Flavours of Fiji gave us a first-hand appreciation of local cuisine, providing an insight into the Fijian culture, with plenty of stories about traditional cooking and everyday life at home in the villages.
Host Ethee told us she and co-cooks Arti and Lia were proud to showcase their cuisine and would help us prepare seven courses - three Fijian and four Fijian Indian - over three hours.
First came a demonstration of the art of opening and scraping the meat out of a coconut - a practice that hasn't changed too much over the years, though the scraping tool - held between the, ahem, thighs (side-saddle for ladies) these days is much more sophisticated.
The next few hours sped by as we visited the "market" (a table laden with ingredients, much of which are bought fresh each morning at a real Nadi market) before every course to get what we needed for each dish, then made our Fijian dishes with guidance from Lia: ika vakalolo (fish in coconut cream), rourou (coarse taro leaves boiled and flavoured to within an inch of their lives, known as "spinach") and tavioka vakalolo (a dessert of cassava balls with coconut cream).
