The Backflip

As a kid doing bomb-dives into the neighbour's pool, I mastered an impressive backflip. The risk of landing with a slap onto the vulnerable skin of my lower back, or even of cracking my scone against the rough brick edge along the raised rim of the deep end was never enough to deter me from this arial manoeuvre. Still today (I'm just a bigger kid) I love the thrill of throwing myself backwards off some great height, never quite sure whether I'll score a series of 10s, or dismally crack the surface with a a slap and a huge splash.

And so it is with this adventure, Archipaddlo. Sometimes when making decisions during this expedition we need to close our eyes, throw ourselves backwards into uncertainty and wait to see how we land. We have just made a radical decision, and performed our gravity-defying backflip.

We were back in Cairns, scheduled to pack our boats into a shipping container bound for Port Moresby, and only minutes away from committing to this direction when we had a conversation with a customs agent in PNG that would flip our adventure upside down. There would be an unavoidable 3 to 4 week delay in processing cargo in Port Moresby due to a backlog in the port, and due to some bureaucratic bunglings we would need to be in Port Moresby from now until the boats became available.

This felt like pushing a big barrel of cow dung up a very steep hill - twice now our plans to enter PNG had been thwarted, and our gut feeling was telling us we needed to make a change. We needed a backflip.

Cairns to Bali, well how about Bali to Cairns?? And then everything fell into place, our gut feeling turned into butterflies, and our new adventure began to unfold.

We are currently zooming across the country in a campervan (or crampervan!) with the kayaks firmly strapped to the roof. Darwin is a brisk 2800km from Cairns, so much easier in a car than a kayak. The boats are scheduled to be on their way to Surabaya (about a week's paddle further west from Bali) by the end of this week. We'll meet our boats over there and hopefully be faced with a more efficient customs process than our PNG debacle.

The goalposts may have changed ends but we're still playing the same sport. We hope to simply reverse our route, paddling from Bali to Cairns. This reversed direction has several advantages that will hopefully make Archipaddlo safer and increase the likelihood of our success.

I guess though, just like in the backyard pool, we'll never know all the outcomes unless we give it a crack. Darwin, Bali, Surabaya, here we come.