Archipaddl-over

Two hundred and forty three days after we paddled away from Trinity Beach in Cairns, we waved goodbye to our kayaks from the dusty, hot tarmac of a deserted jetty at Benoa Harbour in Bali. The boats are on their way back to Australia, and the Archipaddlo journey has come to an end.

Five days on a big boat would seem to be a breeze after spending so many days in a kayak but at each stop along the way, and usually in the middle of the night, the crowd of passengers swelled. Every conceivable space on the boat was taken up with mattresses, sheets of cardboard and anything else people could sleep on. Limbs (hopefully still attached) could be seen hanging over the gunnels of the lifeboats while corridors and stairways were impassable. Crossing from our cabin to the dining hall, a distance of about 10 metres, was like walking through a minefield, and we did our best not to step on the pile of sleeping bodies, babies, bags of fruit, and everything else that had been piled in our way. Of course, being a foreigner meant that every eye was glued to us at all times and our every move was scrutinised in detail so we tucked ourselves away into our tiny cabin and hibernated for 5 days.

Overcrowded to the point of bursting, the hulking vessel Awu lived up to our expectations by arriving in Bali at 3am, 11 hours late, leaving us to wait on a shadeless bitumen at a deserted dock in the sprawling harbour for 7 hours until the freight company arrived to collect our kayaks. We waved off Trinity and Birubi in the back of a truck and hope that they somehow find their way back home.

Archipaddlo has been an incredible adventure. Lain and I began with a big dream and although we ended up on a slightly different track to the one we started on, we are so thrilled and proud to have achieved such a grand goal. This has been an unbelievable opportunity for the two of us to explore some incredible parts of the world, places that travellers normally don't visit, and to get there exactly as we wanted to. We have met so many beautiful people, seen, paddled and swum with so much incredible wildlife, explored untouched beaches, reefs and islands and learnt so much about ourselves in the process.

I would really like to thank you all for following the blog, it has been a lot of fun and a great experience for me to distill down some of our experiences into these short snippets along the way. I also enjoyed an excuse to play with expensive gadgets during the trip! Of course through the blog I have only been able to tell a few brief stories, and I feel that there is so much more to this story that I haven't been able to squeeze into the blogs.

My next adventure, therefore, is to take on a challenge that is just as daunting and as big a step outside my comfort zone as the adventure itself, to write a book about our travels. We still have a few months of travelling to go before there's Aussie soil between these toes again so a book won't be on the shelves before Christmas but I hope that some time during 2012 you'll be able to read the rest of the story and see what really went on in making Archipaddlo such a success.

Sometime later on I'll post again with more details of the release of this #1 Bestseller (well, here's hoping!).

Lain and I have now swapped kayaks for backpacks. There's volcanoes to climb, reefs to freedive, busses to catch, borders to cross and who knows what other adventures we'll have. Our kayaks may have left but that is no reason for us to slow down - the adventure of life continues…

Photos: 1. Juz and Lain, team Archipaddlo; 2. The deck of the Awu, just outside our cabin; 3. Our kayaks 'safely' stored on the deck of the Awu; 4. Two small kayaks, one big boat - the Awu at Benoa Harbour, Bali; 5. Swapping kayaks for backpacks, one adventure finishes while another begins.