Nodi (No, Not The Airport!) Is

Getting Better AH The Time

From a Nadi Correspondent The township of Nadi is shortly to attain status as a town. The v ns hip which has given its name to the famous international airport uch somehow has come to overshadow it, has shown remarkable iwth in the last nine years. This is something it owes more to its ■ahead citizens than to that airport.

1952, it was a main street, dusty, iglected looking, framed by old en shacks for the most part, three concrete buildings were nt. Scrubby plots edged the , uneven pavements of broken trapped the unwary. The in of the Township Board was £I,OOO a year.

Jay Nadi is generally conceded, lot only by Nadi-ites, to be the progressive place in Fiji, daims a number of “firsts”. First racial Chamber of Commerce, to complete all its footpaths in ete. First to own its own office ng. First to have a public gar with children’s playground. It irst to have street lights. Last it gained the first bus station e Suva and also the first foun md drinking stand. ;re are only three wooden build n the main street and these are ocess of being condemned as ire found unsuitable or unsafe, li is now after another first.

Commerce Week Festival, July 15- 22 is the first ever outside of Suva and locals are going to make it the best in Fiji, if trying hard can do it.

Eight days of feting are planned, at tractions being diverse. There will be firewalking, mannequin and Queen parades, trade shows, agricultural shows and, the definite first in Fiji, a Mardi Gras-Battle of Flowers type of masked fancy dress evening, Organised by the Chamber of Commerce, aided by most of the large merchants in Lautoka, the Fes tival is being advertised from Christ church, New Zealand to San Fran cisco by means of neatly designed programmes and coloured posters President of the Chamber told PIM that it was planned to make the Festival an annual event, Once, Nadi-ites were referred to as the Nadi Swells. Today with the thriving international airport close by, and in the centre of a rich district, it again deserves a nickname —possibly the Nadi “Premiers”

The main street of Nadi township—shortly to attain town status.

Photo: Rob Wright