Lucky Dip

The primary school fete is buzzing with activity. A generator blasts air into a jumping castle while several hyperactive kids do their best to expel it with all of their energetic leaps. A fallen toffee apple melts a sticky trail into the neatly trimmed lawn. A small boy hands his last dollar coin over to the volunteering mum who is running the lucky dip stand. A huge basket of small wrapped parcels, blue for boys and pink for girls, beckons the boy who's imagination is running wild. He tests a few mystery gifts and selects his prize, his lucky dip.

In a similar way, our travels through Indonesia are somewhat of a mystery and we are never quite sure what we are going to get. This uncertainty is exacerbated by our limited navigational aids, and lack of information about local tide, current and weather conditions.

Our best map, in fact our only map, is a 1:2,400,000 miniature of the entire Indonesian archipelago. Double sided and laminated, the entire nation has been compressed to not much more than a flimsy A3 sheet. Huge islands like Lombok are just a few centimetres across, a whole day's paddling is sometimes only a (somewhat demoralising) centimetre on the page. At this magnification the detail is appalling. Huge bays are barely shown as an inlet, islands are not marked, vast rivers are not recorded, towns are not listed and those that are, with the roads that join them, are in completely the wrong place.

Second in our arsenal is the trusty GPS. This battery powered magic machine somehow knows where we are, or at least I assume it does. Hopefully the string of numbers that I upload to Google Maps roughly correlates with a coastline somewhere. Unfortunately, the digital map that Garmin so expensively sold me for this area, with great promises of the accuracy of the data, is hopelessly flawed. The pinpoint accuracy of the satellite receiver does not match the simplified angular coastlines of the map. Most of the time the digital map is about 970 metres out of whack. The waypoints of each campsite we have recorded are set either a kilometre inland or somehow hundreds of metres off shore. The GPS map allows us to work out rough distances between two spots, and the approximate distances we have covered each day but it is far from a perfect navigational tool.

Stuffed somewhere in my kayak is my trusty old iPhone, with some awesome apps that map the marine charts for this area. The Navionics charts show much more detail than the digital map on the GPS but the GPS device in the phone is not nearly as accurate at locating where we are. The iPhone maps are however, easier to use and show greater detail than on the GPS. For instance, today we paddled past a string of islands, several of which were over a hundred metres high and at least ten hectares in area. The paper map showed nothing. The GPS digital map showed nothing. The iPhone at least showed a shallow reef roughly in the area of the islands, suggesting that the rocks were exposed at low tide.

On each of our deck bags, small water resistant bags with a wide zip that we use like a glove box, there is a small kayaking compass. These compasses are made by a reputable brand (Silva) and are a quality compass, actually pointing to magnetic north. The problem is that the mount is a flexible bungee cord system, and our deck bags do not sit quite square on the deck (to make way for the rolled up sail on one side and the sea anchor on the other). The result is that though we each have a compass, they are not aligned square on our boats and we appear to be heading in different directions. If we were both to paddle due east every day we would end up in different countries.

Travel guidebooks like the Lonely Planet are popular with exactly the sort of tourists we hope to avoid during this adventure. Although they might contain some useful info about certain places I can bet my last litre of drinking water on the fact that these books would barely show a listing for most of the places we have visited. Even if we had brought a guidebook (which we never would) it would have been used as firelighters or toilet paper long ago.

So why don't I just check the details on the web? Great idea. While I somehow have the magic to update the blog through a satellite phone, the technology does not allow the transfer speeds needed to just zoom into Google Earth. Wouldn't it be nice.

Moons tell us the tides, or close enough and winds vary inconsistently from day to day. There are plenty of fishermen who claim to know the local waters but they tend to travel no further than the end of their local beach and asking for the conditions of the current in the next strait is like asking them for an accurate ski report for some Japanese mountain resort.

And so we are like the little boy at the school fete. Every day is a small mystery gift wrapped in exciting crinkly paper. We find our way, and the gifts in the box get more exciting every time.

Photo: Lain discussing local conditions with a group of friendly fisherman.