Back to Immigration at 1000h where the whole episode was repeated. The great concern was that we had encroached on tribal land (which we had proof that we had not) & after much discussion amongst the officials & frustration from us, we were allowed to go. The result of all this was that they agree that their documents, (particularly the very important Restricted Area Permit), & permit processes are not correct & they will review the whole thing. Some of them amazingly, seem to have a total lack of knowledge of the geography of their island paradise. The real problem here seems to us to be that there are many agencies – we had to confront Coast Guard, Navy, Harbour Master, Customs, Immigration, Police, Special Branch, Electricity Commission and three or four others that were never clearly identified – but incredibly cumbersome paperwork systems which make inter-agency communication almost impossible. No two agencies seem to agree on just where cruisers are or are not allowed to travel. Hence, permission can be given , for example, by the Harbour Master, (who is officially charged with approving proposed itineraries), for a yacht to go from A to B but at any point along the way that permission can be revoked by another, often unidentified, agency. Our fiasco forced this galaxy of ‘authorities’ to confront each other and suddenly discover the extent of their mutual misunderstandings. Hopefully they will make a real effort to address the issue and we will have spared others the sort of frustrating experience we had.
We started the clearing out process at the Harbour Master’s office. The process is incredibly convoluted & untidy. Everything is handwritten in triplicate in different ledgers using different colour pens & staff come & go in the office & sit & chat. We paid anchoring fees of R 1592 for our visit, collected our paper work & thankfully left. A Tuk-tuk ride to the Customs Office. This is in a decrepit dirty building & the office is a mess with papers everywhere, no filing cabinet just piles of ancient papers. Interesting to be told about the corrupt senior customs officer who was arrested last week. Even more interesting that he is on bail but still at work!!!!!
We arrived at customs just 20 minutes before the lunch break so we were served very quickly.
Went to the Hotel Chompen for lunch, to the dining room on the fourth floor. Delicious food but just for a touch of excitement, I managed to get locked in the toilet!!! I banged & yelled & Nick finally came but had great difficulty making the staff understand the problem. I managed to get the door open after about ten minutes which was a relief. The lock mechanism had fallen apart but the staff were not terribly concerned.