Kailana

The last you heard from us we were on our way to Lombok from Sumbawa. We are now back in the company of our other yachties. The crossing to Lombok was easy enough, only being able to sail about half the way. We stayed in a decent enough anchorage on the North East of Lombok, which proved to be a bit tricky to get into, fellow yacht, Esoterica scraped the reef, proving the old boating proverb, "there are those who have run aground and there are those that are about to".
Another yacht called Luna Ray has joined the pack. This is a young couple (younger than us anyway), Luke & Naomi with their young son Alex, only 3 years old (LU-NA Ray, get it?). They have travelled from Brisbane and are on their way to Thailand. They have had constant engine problems almost their entire way and entered the anchorage at the NE of Lombok with their dinghy strapped to the side of their boat, outboard running, ready to be banged into gear if the engine was to cut out. Phil, John & Kev took a visit over to them once anchored and found that their diesel system was sucking some air....gave them a hand and they have been good ever since. The anchorage was tight with 6 yachts crammed together. You could almost hear each others' dinner conversations.
Early the following day we all gingerly exited the anchorage. With the sun low in the sky it is almost impossible to see the reef, hence it is always best to enter an anchorage close to midday. This day we were heading to Gili Air, at the North East of Lombok and the run of about 47 miles was one of those perfect passages that only us yachties can boast about. A bit like how fisherman will tell the story about the one that was 'this big' that got away, this was a sail door to door with the wind perfect for our needs. We flew the gennaker for most of the trip and the wind seemed to track us around Lombok the entire way.
Arriving at Gili Air was a bit of an awakening to all of the other tourists choosing Indonesia to be their holiday destination. The island is almost entirely inhabited with holiday cottages, restaurants, bars, etc. From a long way off we could see lots of white and reddish bodies laying on the beach soaking up the UV rays. Thankfully Gili Air has provided some moorings, however on attaching to one and giving it a wee pull with Kailana to check its integrity, we were a little alarmed to find it moving backwards with the boat. Perhaps it is a portable mooring?!! Maybe we can just take this mooring with us wherever we go?! As you can imagine not many of the mooring were ideal and Esoterica & Luna Ray brushed the coral at low tide during the night. Esoterica awoke in the middle of the night to find themselves sitting on top of the 44 gallon drum which the mooring was attached to!
Gili Air was our opportunity to get back to the wood fired pizza thing, table service, night life, massages, etc, etc. It is a nice place, but nothing like it was when Kev was there in about '98, when there were only about 10 tourists on the island and a couple of places to stay. Now there is seemingly thousands of tourists and hundreds of places to stay. We enjoyed spending long hours having coffees or a bintang beer in the little thatched huts on the beach, going for walks and enjoying some of the good food Gili Air had to offer. There are no cars or motorbikes on Gili Air, only horse and carts so it feels quite rustic in a way. We caught up with 'Beau Solais' crew and a few others for dinner one night where you choose your fish and then get it cooked up. You can choose to have your food come out on a kebab which is the size of one of your arms....with big chunks of vegetables and meat on it. We also took in one of the most amazing sunsets where you could see Mount Agung over on Bali. We spent 3 nights at the Gili Air mooring before dropping the line (always more pleasant than lifting the anchor) and turning Kailana towards Bali's Benoa harbour.
The passage from Lombok to Bali is known to be rough if the conditions are all wrong, but it was thankfully kind to us, with a good following current, occasionally reaching 11 knots! If arriving at Lombok was a shock to the system, then entering Benoa harbour was going to be a slammer. All marine traffic is controlled by the International Collision Regulations (Col-Regs), a set of very precise instructions that set out how vessels should pass each other, who has right of way, etc, similar to the roads. There is no real inclusion for a motor driven vessel (speedboat), approaching head on with another vessel at 30 knots, attached to a human suspended from a parachute 200m above (paraglider) and to your starboard side. If the line was in someway to get tangled with our mast / rigging, it would surely be a big surprise to the aviation trainee above and to us. However, these guys are no fools and ducked out of our way at the very last minute, all a bit nerve racking for us, but I'm sure great fun for the speedboat pilot and trill seeking tourist flying high above us.
Bali International Marina has capacity for about 20 boats only, on a crumbling, half submerged jetty, with power cables draped through the water and passing sludge coated rubbish on each tide change. The water is that dirty that depending on the tidal flow, flushing the toilet onboard can sometimes provide you with dirtier seawater than the seawater you are flushing away! Filling a white bucket of 'fresh' water from the tap will get you water with a slight yellow colour to it, with the occasional green floaty bit. Let's just say, it is far from drinking water.
We now had Esoterica, Apa Lagi, Sagata, Luna Ray and ourselves at the marina and once settled in, it was a pretty good and friendly little marina, once you got used to the decaying nature of the place. The best bit is for the princely sum of $35 per day you could get a 'boat boy' to do all your irritating / time consuming jobs onboard. We managed to get all our stainless steel sparkling and our hull fibreglass all cut & polished.....two days work for a mere $55. Seeing as these were normally jobs assigned to 'first mate' (i.e Rebecca), she was pretty ecstatic about the idea of 'hired help'.
A number of charterboats also operate out of Bali Marina. One of them is a big pink catamaran that is loaded up with sober dressed white people in the morning, but seems to arrive back with barely dressed, lobster coloured drunk people. We amusingly witnessed first hand an Australian stag 'do' arriving back to deposit its almost comatosed clientele ashore. It seems about 10 of them took to running about the vessel naked, pissing all over the place, with 3 of them falling overboard, with emergency recovery required each time. Also, a camera and wallet went missing, no doubt due to pissed up forgetfulness rather than theft, however the crew were all being blamed for stealing. As you can imagine, the crew were not best pleased. The boats run non stop and blast their 'macarana' music, one of the boats even has the crew dance on deck for the guests as they disembark. Kev was particularly interested in one of the catamarans that took about 50 bikini clad women out for the day....he nearly lost his footing on the dock.
A 20 minute taxi drive away is Kuta Beach, the epicentre of Bali's tourist trade, knock-off copies, bars, resturants, etc. The entire economy of Bali has had its ups and downs with terrorist attacks on Kuta and the resulting impact on the tourist industry. Everything seems to be back to normal, for now, and there's plenty of traffic through Kuta and the rest of Bali. Not just seeing the hordes of big pocketed holiday makers but the constant stream of aircraft, seemingly brushing the top of our masts during take off out of Denpasar Airport. We happened to be right at the end of the international runway, where we were able to almost count the number of passengers as they flew past.
Our main reason to come to Bali was to extend our visa. The summary of the flim-flam events shall follow. We were originally granted a 60-day tourist visa on our arrival into Indonesia, this being able to be extended for a further 30-days on arrival in Bali, which we are told would take 2-3 days. We arrived into Bali on Saturday 20th of Sept, lets call this Day 1. We gave our passports for the extension to our agent on day 2. We all patiently hung about the marina or head off about Bali on a trip. Let's zoom forward to day 8 when we are told that our passports will now arrive on day 10 or 11. At this point our agent flies back to Jakarta and decides to no longer answer his phone. On day 11 we find out the passports will not be available until day 17! Remember this is for an extension of 30-days, which seems to take 17-days to process.
You may ask why we are needing an extension to our visas when we should be heading out of Indonesia back to Australia. Our original plan was to get to Bali and take a sharp turn left towards Bali, but as we have discussed, the plans of the yachtie are written in the sand at low tide. Cliche bollocks, we know, but kind of true. For us to turn back to Perth would mean fighting against the predominant southerly (and potentially cyclonic!) winds that the West Australian coast provides over the summer months, this not fully understood on leaving Perth for this particular Heist. We either try and sail against it, or burn a whole ocean of fuel fighting it, whatever the choice it would be one hell of an uncomfortable trip back to Perth. So, what to do? We can't stay in Indonesia, Australia isn't an option, so follow the original rally route, with all the other rally yachts to Singapore via Borneo! Arriving in Singapore will see us passing up the west coast of Malaysia to Langkawi, a further 1,000 miles to the north. This is the decision at this stage, written in the sand and all that bollocks..... but SE Asia offers a great deal for the yachtie. Spares & repairs are plentiful, good cruising grounds, cheap marinas for boat storage, the only 'downer' being the long international flight from Perth to visit the boat.
Problem solved? Well, not quite. Committed to this new route we now have to do about 1,200 miles in about 20 days (due to visa extension dramas). This is ok if you have a fast car on a freeway / motorway, but a painful distance if you are only going at a fast jogging pace (about 11-hours a day, everyday for 3-weeks!). Any yachtie will tell you this is a horrible amount of distance to cover in the time available. We should be ok as we are planning on doing 4-5 overnight sails to get a bit of distance under our belts.
We took a couple of days to head to 'Ubud', this being the 'Zen' capital of Bali, a place to come find your inner self. Ubud is known for its yoga, artists, etc. Based on a book, a film called 'Eat, Pray, Love', staring the zen-tastic Julia Roberts, was filmed in Ubud. Since then a lot of people have arrived in Ubud to find their inner-ness, leaving it a bit like an upmarket outer suburb of Kuta.
Taking the potluck plunge on 'Wotif.com' we found a nice hotel in the heart of Ubud. We had a driver to take us from Benoa harbour, via a few tourist stops (traps) on the way (e.g. temples and the rice terraces). On getting close to the hotel the driver told us we would be sleeping with the monkeys. Ubud is known for the 'Monkey Forest' and our hotel just happened to be adjacent to it. Entering the hotel reception it was clear that the driver had a point, loads of monkeys milling around pestering the guests. So what do the staff do with the new arriving hotel guests? Only give them all a brightly coloured sugary drink with a big chunk of pineapple, a monkey's favourite! Not long had we sat down before our driver, who also had one of these drinks, gave his pineapple chunk to one of the monkeys. Rebecca followed suit. This particularly big monkey seemed to take a liking to Rebecca, jumping up on the table, showing her his yellowy teeth, then proceeding to give her a nip on the waist! Shrieks and pink drink going everywhere, no real damage done, but a nasty bruise was now in the post for poor Rebecca. This little episode watered down Rebecca's enthusiasm for traipsing off to the Monkey Forest.
We spent 3 nights in Ubud, just wandering around soaking it all up. This was the first time off the boat for 2 months, so nice to have a bed that stayed still and as much fresh water as we could ever want. One job on the list was for Kev to remove the 'head sock' (beard), now in cultivation for 2 months and being removed right back to a blank canvas. Having forgotten the hair clipper back in Perth, we had to borrow Sagata's aging pair for the landmark event. So, after a couple of beers, the clipper came out and into it Kevin went. Unfortunately the clippers were really only 'trimmers' not really designed to take on the mammoth task at hand, but try it did. It did a Stirling job, until it got to the very last palm sized clump right on top, where it decided it had had enough and that's when it gave up the ghost! Very, very funny for Rebecca and very, very upsetting for Kevin. The following morning was a very painstakingly time consuming exercise with a small Swiss army knife scissors to get through the last of it. Kev's actually quite proud that he still has enough hair to destroy a set of hair clippers, how many of you can boast about that then? The fact that he looked like a Hari Krishna for 12 hours is besides the point.
We took a trip on one of the days in Ubud and joined a cycle tour up a volcano. I say 'up' a volcano, actually we were driven to the top and we cycled down it, passing through remote villages, paddy fields, temples, etc. It was nice to get out of all the tourist commotion and see a bit of Bali for what Bali is. The island is surprisingly fertile, where they seem to grow mostly everything. We had breakfast in a restaurant overlooking three volcanos, Mount Batur, one other we can't remember the name of and Mount Agung. The view was quite magnificent. We then stopped at the guide's house and had a traditional meal which was the best we had tasted for a while. The sambal sauce was also the hottest we had tasted with eyes watering and noses running as a result. We took in some local dancing one night, with women chanting and traditional Balinese dancing, along with a dash of fire walking. The firewalking was by far the most amusing bit with the 'firewalker' burning his feet (we assume that wasn't part of the act!). A friend of Rebecca's happened to be in Ubud at the same time so we caught up with Janine, Michael and their kids at "Cafe Lotus' for a couple hours which was a lovely restaurant surrounding a beautiful temple.
Although the general population of Indonesia is Muslim, Balinese Hinduism is practiced by the majority of the population of Bali (90%). Our driver on the way up told us that most Balinese Hindus have a temple inside their house (actually potentially 'several' temples) and that this is the first thing to get built - even before the house! Not only does each house have a temple, each community also has a temple. Hence, there are many temples in Bali. Marriage is a 'must' for Balinese Hindus so there have been many a 'quizzical' look cast towards us both due to not being married..! Offerings are made daily to the gods, with incense being lit, and little banana leaves filled with flowers, rice, money, cigarettes, sweets etc. No matter where you go, there will be someone making an offering at some time of the day.
Back at Benoa harbour it was now time to reprovision the boat for the next leg, this time taking us to Borneo. This means organising diesel, petrol, food, water etc. Bali has a couple of good supermarkets for this and we got pretty much everything we needed. We are only getting low on cooking gas, which we had no luck in filling... We have a spare bottle (small sized) which should see us through. We were now playing the waiting game for the passports and with days ticking past, we spent the time getting jobs done around the boat. To give you an idea of the 'time ticking' even the ship's bell got a clean... now that does sound like we were struggling for things to do. We all took a trip into Kuta, found a hotel that would let us use their pool in exchange for the purchase of drinks and this saw us flopped down on sun loungers, taking over the pool area, much to the dismay of the hotel residents I am sure! The Benoa marina itself has a little restaurant that is open from 8-4 so we all spent a considerable amount of time hanging there, having breakfast or lunch. Sometimes when the restaurant was closed at night, we would take our gas lamps up and do a potluck and sit out on the veranda overlooking the marina. Other times we ordered a takeaway nasi goreng and the crew from Apa Lagi, who had the use of a motorcycle, would pick it up for us and bring back to the marina. We ended up doing a few trips by 'bemo taxi' into Kuta, and did the token 'massage and bintang beer' on Kuta beach. The workers were quite surprised to find a couple of tourists, having a go at talking their Indonesian language...not something you get with from the average token tourist visiting Bali. Two months in remote Indonesian villages will have that effect on you when trying to haggle! On our last trip into Kuta, we ordered some bean bags for the boat. We paid $40 each and they are not only MASSIVE, bright electric blue, but they are extremely well made from tough boatey type material...we were happy little customers. These are going to be great to have in the pilot house for our overnight passage to Borneo. We enjoyed Bali, but would visit the less populated parts of it if we were to go back (Perhaps the northeast coast).
So...long story short, we are now preparing the boat to leave Bali, without our passports onboard, where all five boats are in the same boat (excuse the pun). We have organised to get the passports sent ahead of us on the rally route. There are risks with this approach, but the more days we wait in Bali, the harder the remainder of the trip will be, as there's still a lot of distance to cover (>1,000 miles). It is roughly the same distance we have done in the last 2 months that we have to cover in about 3 weeks. The Sail Indonesia rally organisation has been almost non existent. Our faithful agent is now back in Jakarta and is suffering from 'stress' due to the visas muck up for all the rally participants....so as a result he will not answer his phone and all we have is another agent's phone number in Bali. We only met 'Ruth' yesterday and don't know her from a bar of soap, however we have entrusted her with our passports so that they can be sent to the other side of the country, on a promise and a prayer. Eeeeek! Bring on Borneo and the trip up the river to see the orang-utans! Surely they might have a better idea about our visas than the Indonesian Immigration do?