Torpedoing through the red tape.

Delays, waiting, hotel rooms, smoky offices, diarrhoea, bed bugs, overnight busses and trains, concrete jungles, feral bathrooms, and a submarine - hardly the things one would consider integral to a kayaking adventure.

The 12 days it was scheduled to take our kayaks to be transported from Darwin to Singapore has somehow turned into over a month due to unexpected shipping delays. Fortunately we have had extra time to sharpen our scissors and slice through the labyrinth of red tape that the Indonesian authorities have placed in our way.

Lain's remarkable grasp of the language, and her diplomatic dealings with so many stern-faced stiffs behind the tall desks of Jakarta's boxy government offices has resulted in our having "diplomatic immunity" (one for the Lethal Weapon fans). We have a letter from the Department of Trade that states we can bypass the normal processes for importing products into Indonesia. We also have a special permit from the Director General of Customs that gives us
unique rights to paddle our kayaks throughout most of the archipelago. The ship from Singapore is due to arrive in Surabaya today, with our boats hopefully safely packed inside, however without both of these customised letters our kayaks would be on the first boat back to Australia with their rudders between their legs.

Despite so much of our time being spent organising all this red tape we have managed to squeeze in a few days to explore Bogor, a 'small town' (just 3 million people) a short and very overcrowded train ride south of Jakarta. Bogor's crowning glory is a massive botanic gardens, originally built in the early 1800s in the grounds of the Governor General's summer house. Two hundred years on and the massive rainforest trees that line the avenues of this grand garden are perhaps the only old growth forest in Indonesia that is free from the threat of being turned into furniture.

Now that we are waiting the (hopefully) last few days in Surabaya we are exploring this somewhat soul-less city's sparse tourist attractions. We have decided not to go out searching for the mud volcano in the south of the city - a huge, swelling pond of hot mud, swallowing suburbs as it gurgles through the Earth's crust. Instead we found the ex-Russian submarine that, for some reason, is permanently on show in the middle of town. We might even rustle up the energy to go exploring the city's other major tourist attraction, a cigarette factory! Nope, this city is not renowned as a tourist wonderland.

So if all goes to plan (I think we are up to 'Plan Z') then in just a few more days we might actually be able to use these atrophied bodies to slide our paddles back into the water and start heading East. Somewhere here there is an adventure waiting to happen!

Pictures: Lain manipulating Indonesia's red-tape system (in a Russian submarine), and Juz, 'Nature Boy', getting in touch with one of his old friends.