While we only spent four days in Darwin I felt like I knew the place. Perhaps it was the Brisbane of my youth, perhaps youth itself (if I have any left!!) or perhaps it is a new energy that just felt so right, Darwin had a welcoming feeling to it that I haven't felt since driving into Port Stephens for the first time.
We were fortunate enough to spend our time in Darwin with friends, old and new, who helped to make our stay so pleasant. I would quite happily have kept exploring the Northern Territory in our minivan, or exploring the many delights of Darwin had we not been scheduled to jump on a flight to Bali.
To ship all of our gear, kayaks and equipment to Surabaya was a mission in its own right. We had to strip through all our carefully packaged dry bags and other gear to make sure that we were not attempting to ship dangerous goods or banned substances into Indonesia. With Ms Corby still wallowing in some Balinese prison we wanted to make sure that Indonesian authorities had no necessity to question our neatly packaged kayaks. Our vacuum-sealed packets of flour (white powder in a plastic bag) for making bread were the first to go! Cigarette lighters, life-jacket inflators, marine flares and, reluctantly, the remainder of our food was all left behind in Darwin.
And here we are, in Bali, waiting. Waiting for our kayaks to arrive, waiting for visas, waiting for bureaucracy. I suspect this will become a common thread to our lives over the next few months. Essentially there is no cheap or easy way to do what we hope to do. Despite our grand plans the Indonesian authorities see us as tourists, and they are right. We wish to out-stay the normal tourist visa by many months so our case creates bureaucratic indecision, delays and complications that not even the most well-intended backsheesh can resolve. This is not so much a paddling holiday as an experiment in paperwork.
As the number of days remaining on our tourist visa slowly expire, we zoom around Kuta on a motorbike (Lain drives like a formula 1 champ) trying to find loopholes in the visa process, while dodging the throngs of Aussie yobbos adorned in Bintang singlets and freshly swelling tattoos.
The next stop is west, into Java, and one step closer to putting paddles back into the water. Our kayaks are passengers themselves at the moment, in a container bound for Surabaya (via Singapore). We should be there in a day or so to coordinate their arrival. It may still be another week or two before we actually paddle away but that cannot come soon enough.
In the meantime Lain and I are enjoying the delights of the many food wagons (typhoid trolleys) and testing out the odd Bintang. Anything goes in Bali, just don't trust the money changers!
Photos: Lain testing out a self-inflating PFD as we packed our gear in Darwin. Life is like a box of chocolates in Bali.
The map says you are in Surabaya - so congratulations on making the next step. Assuming all the visas drop into place - and that your kayaks and gear arrive in one piece then what next? Overland and ferry back to Bali - or do you start paddling from Surabaya?
ReplyDeleteTried durian yet?
All the best with the next stage. If the gear is slow to arrive then head for the hills ( and mountains and volcanoes) - Central Java is magic.