Aisa

Heart of Asia

Indonesia.

'The time has come' the walrus said 'to speak of many things, of coral reefs and mud banks, of Dragons and permit-things.'

 I'm in Bali, having come via Waingapu and Komodo Island. The one time our old charts with the words "there be dragons here" was actualy correct. Unfortunately may of out charts of Indonesia are so old that they say there be dragons here all over the place not just komodo.

Well the journey from Darwin was uneventful in the beginning, too uneventful there wasn't a breath of wind and it was hot hot hot. hot like I've never even dreamed of. We decided to put into Waingapu on Sumba Island, we didn't have an accurate chart but we figured we'd manage ok...... So we sat aground on a coral reef for the best part of the morning, luckily no damage. We met some friendly locals who all shouted "hello Meester" repeatedly, I always though that was an asian steriotype....

Waingapu.

We eventually got in there after negotiating the evil coral reef, and took a taxi into town, town turned out to be a 400,000 person dump. All 400,000 of them said hello Meesta....... It got to be a bit of a drag after a while the bank didn't really exchange any money and eventually gave us half the going rate. The taxi had more speakers than seats and the base combined with the very soogy suspension made it feel like a malfunctioning fairground ride. We got done eventually for not having cleared into Indonesia... Yep its that Permit-thing. So we informed them of our engine problem, they didn't seem to mind, I think we're probably the only white people they've seen in a couple of years. So off we went to Komodo Island home of the Dragons, boy are they ugly! Komodo was smaller and cleaner, the harbourmaster who was more used to Tourists but missing the numbers due to the Timor crisis, caught us again but didn't find out about our previous transgression in Waingapu becase of a photocopied clearance from Darwin. We left Komodo and are in Bali, which has lots of People and lots of rice and lots of hindu temples.

Its defiantly not Australia Leaving for Singapore before we get in more trouble.

Next stop Singapore

We headed off asap to Lankawi, Malaysia duty free (and there was much rejoicing), climbed mountains etc, got drunk with Pierre (owner) and Duncan (skipper) of Melanjen and got a place crewing on the kings cup!

At some point I'll get tround to writing it up and putting it in here! -but not today