Day 66, Year 3: Fueled Up and Ready to Go
Date: Monday, July 14, 2008
Weather: No Change, Still Beautiful but Warmer
Location: Fannie Bay, Darwin, Northern Territory, Australia

Our first job today was to pull up anchor and motor over to Cullen Bay Marina which is across Fannie Bay to fill up with diesel. Actually we didn’t fill-up. We put 200 liters in our center tank which didn’t quite fill it and our starboard and port tanks are still more than half full. This will certainly get us to Kupang, our first stop in Indonesia, and there we can buy diesel at a much cheaper price. The fuel today was duty-free and was about $1.46 per liter. That makes it about $6.00 a gallon which is way cheaper than we paid in Cairns. We haven’t been given the exact price in Indonesia, but it will certainly be cheaper than this.

So we are fueled up, but the “ready to go” doesn’t refer to readiness for leaving for Indonesia. We are ready to go touring in the Northern Territory. We rented a car late this afternoon and will leave early in the morning with Donna and Gerry on an explore. We are doing this one by the seat of our pants. We really don’t have the money to do this, but we decided to use the “plastic money” and go for it. We’ll never be back here again, and we don’t want to regret not seeing at least some of the inland Northern Territory. Car rentals here are very expensive, and even more than in the US, gasoline prices are sky high. And distances here are huge. Nothing is close, but in three days, our hope would be to see the Kakadu, maybe Katherine Gorge, and definitely Litchfield National Park, and get back here in time to do some provisioning while we have the car and still make the 5 pm barbeque on Thursday. Probably way too ambitious, and tomorrow morning we will have to make some hard decisions on what we can really accomplish in the three days, but one can dream. The car we rented is quite plush. It was all that was available, but because it is so much roomier than the next step down, we think we might be able to sleep in it. That will save a lot of money if we can sleep in the car in a campground. So whatever we end up doing, I’m sure we will come back with memories of wonderful experiences.

Once we return, we will have eight days to do the final preparations for our trip through Indonesia, Malaysia, and Thailand. We leave Darwin, ready or not, on Saturday morning, July 26 at 11 am. We will arrive in Kupang, East Timor about four days later and then the festivities begin. Between now and then, I need to learn some Bahasa Indonesian. So as soon as we return from our land trip, it is really, really time to get busy.

Note: We are going to be gone for the next three days, and we will probably not be able to send a log until we return. If there is internet where we are going, we will send the logs, but otherwise, the logs for the next three days will be sent when we return to Windbird on Thursday night.

080714 Day 66 Cullen Bay–Fueling Up