by Judy Handley | Jul 19, 2008 | Australia Darwin and Area, Sailing Logs Year 3 |
Day 71, Year 3: Super Work Day
Date: Saturday, July 19, 2008
Weather: Beautiful, Sunny Weather
Location: Fannie Bay, Darwin, Northern Territory, Australia
Yesterday’s panic resulted in a frantic work day today. We certainly didn’t get it all done, but we made great progress. Mark got the sewing done on both the headsail and the bimini; we did the best we could on scraping the “green grass” growing along our waterline; and I finally got all of the food lockers cleaned out and the remainder of the food we bought on Thursday stowed away. There is still much to do, but we feel good about today. Tomorrow we will chip away at the list again. I will
do cooking and canning in the morning and am hoping to have the time to go to the Northern Territory Museum tomorrow afternoon. Mark has to go up the mast to put in another LED anchor light and hope that this one works. He also has more sewing jobs that would be nice to get done but are not necessary. So tomorrow’s agenda is set.
Tonight we went to the Sail Indonesia Welcome Barbeque. It was held here at the Darwin Sailing Club. There were also two wedding receptions happening at the same time, so we had wedding parties being led in by bagpipers and Indonesians entertaining us with gamelan music (something like xylophones). Tonight we sat with Judy and Howard of Laelia (Santa Cruz, California) and Ken and Jean of Renaissance 2000 (Canada). Howard is a retired marine biologist from the University of California Santa Cruz,
did post-doctoral work in Boston, and then did a couple of research stints at the Marine Biological Lab in Woods Hole. It was fun to talk with a couple who are familiar with a part of the world that we know well. Judy and Howard have also lived in Indonesia, Malaysia, and Thailand and they are a wealth of information on this part of the world. Another interesting thing tonight was watching all of the Rally children at play. I don’t know how many boats have young children, but I do know that there
are a number of children ranging from ages nine months to the teen years-more children than we have seen gathered in one place during our voyage. Traveling with more than a hundred other boats is going to be an interesting experience. Once we all reach Kupang, our first destination, I know we will split apart, but there are events in tiny little places in Indonesia where we all come back together again. People who have done the Rally in the past have wonderful things to say about it, so I guess
we will all get used to each other and enjoy the experience together.
by Judy Handley | Jul 18, 2008 | Australia Darwin and Area, Sailing Logs Year 3 |
Day 70, Year 3: Panic Time
Date: Friday, July 18, 2008
Weather: Beautiful, Sunny Weather
Location: Fannie Bay, Darwin, Northern Territory, Australia
The time has come to panic. We still have to upload photos for the last fifty days of travel and only half of those are named. Internet in Indonesia is slow and found only in major cities, so we need to do our internet research while we are here. We are leaving here in one week and we haven’t a clue what we need to do to get a Malaysia or Thailand visa. We don’t know what anchorages we plan to visit while in Indonesia. And we don’t even know where we are going after Thailand and this is the last place to purchase inexpensively copied charts. We are still torn between going through the Red Sea to Turkey in the Mediterranean or going around South Africa. So today we ordered charts for the South Africa alternative “just in case” and we will just have to sell them in Thailand to another cruiser if we decide on going to the Mediterranean. We were given a CD by the Sail Indonesia crew that has SO MUCH information on it and we are just now getting time to look at it. It seems we have been busy every minute since we arrived here, but we are going to have to get even busier if we are really going to be ready to leave next Saturday. We have a five-hour information meeting on Tuesday and we need to go to that with any questions we have. So in addition to doing the required reading before Tuesday’s meeting, we have sails and a bimini that need to be repaired. I had hoped to can spaghetti sauce before leaving here and it is time to make granola again. I can do that in Indonesia if I just make sure I have the ingredients I need, but I need to borrow someone’s canner and that would be much easier to do here. But one way or another, we will get things done.
I walked to the Fannie Bay Shopping Center this morning to place our meat order. The butcher there will freeze and vacuum pack the meat for us and although it costs to get this done, it is much safer. You can’t bring a lot of meat to our freezer at one time and expect it to freeze quickly and buying a little bit each day is just too time consuming. So I decided to pay the price and placed the order. On the way to the butcher I had a most pleasant surprise. I took a shortcut instead of staying on the sidewalk and walked right into six red-tailed cockatoos that were on the ground feeding. I almost stepped on one, but by the time I got my camera out, they were long gone. I think I scared them as much as they startled me. But it was really neat to see them up so close. They are much larger than I imagined from seeing them at a distance and they have such huge heads. Their heads are just a little bigger than my fist and their beaks are big and strong. I wouldn’t want to tangle with one of them.
When I returned to the Sailing Club after my jaunt to the butcher shop, Mark was using the very slow wireless internet connection at the club and had just gotten an email from our daughter Heather. She is only working part-time these days so she can be with Sam and has taken a leave from science research. She is currently working for the Cape and Islands public radio station, WCAI, doing a series of weekly reports on science and scientists in Woods Hole. Her first story just aired and we were able to go to the WCAI website and hear it. It was about ocean sounds that are heard under the water. So congratulations, Heather! Well done. We know getting the first report of a series aired is always the hardest and the most exciting. I guess those public radio genes must have passed from father to daughter. It was a great report and we look forward to hearing others as we can along the way. Our son Justin is currently working on a “virtual world” website that went public during the first week of July. After only two days, it was doing great, but we are anxious to hear an update from him. I’ll report on that when we hear.
Sunset tonight was spectacular. As the sun went down in the west, the full moon rose to the east over the Darwin Sailing Club. Acres and acres of land in the Northern Territory are control burned every day in order to try and prevent wild fires. Evidently the burning was just east of Fannie Bay today and the gray smoke added an interesting touch to the red sunset. It was a dusky sky that looked like it was on fire.
Tomorrow is an at home sewing and cooking day and then we attend the Sail Indonesia “official” barbecue tomorrow night at the Sailing Club. That should be a fun evening and it will give us a chance to meet a few more of the 250+ cruisers participating in this rally.
by Judy Handley | Jul 17, 2008 | Australia Darwin and Area, Sailing Logs Year 3 |
Day 69, Year 3: A Day of Provisioning
Date: Thursday, July 17, 2008
Weather: No Change, Beautiful, Sunny Weather
Location: Fannie Bay, Darwin, Northern Territory, Australia
Shop, shop, and then shop some more. That was the story for today. We had the rental car for the day so we took advantage and did the grocery shopping for the next three months. There will be supermarkets in Kupang and on one other island before we reach Bali, but basically we need to stock up for the next two months. We will be in Singapore in three months and will be able to buy whatever we need there. But still shopping for the two months until we reach Bali was a bit of a challenge. It is mostly done now, but there are a few things remaining on the list. Meat must be ordered from the butcher. There are certain items that were sold out today and we will have to go back and get those, but for the most part, we have most of the food we need. What we need now is a few quiet days when we can get the little jobs on Windbird done and can do the reading necessary to prepare us for the next leg of our journey. Not sure what tomorrow will bring, but we are certain that is will include shopping. Tonight we attended a gathering of many of the boats that will be participating in the rally. We traded books and just spent time getting to know each other.
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Thanks to our daughter Heather for getting a mail packet off to us. We received that mail today only a week after it was sent. She included a painting by Sam which will grace the walls in our cabin. Sam, you make your grandparents infinitely happy with your artwork. Keep it coming.
by Judy Handley | Jul 16, 2008 | Australia Darwin and Area, Sailing Logs Year 3 |
Day 68, Year 3: Day Trip to Litchfield National Park
Date: Wednesday, July 16, 2008
Weather: No Change, Still Beautiful but Warmer
Location: Fannie Bay, Darwin, Northern Territory, Australia
We said goodbye to Pine Creek early this morning and headed north up the highway. We drove through a couple of small towns, one of which was Hayes Creek. Hayes was my father’s name, so I stopped and took a picture of the town sign in honor of my dad. We also got a couple of photos of the “road trains” along the way. These are freight trucks with three, four, or five cargo trailers attached. I guess when a truck is coming all the way up here to the Top End they want to bring as much freight as possible. We made a quick stop in Adelaide Springs to take photos of the river and visit the War Cemetery. Evidently Adelaide Springs was a base in World War II, thus the cemetery here. Then we headed on north.
Our next stop was along the road to examine the huge termite mounds. We would sometimes see “villages” of them and sometimes there were whole “cities.” The lands here are burned periodically to control wild fires. We have seen whole forests of blackened trees, but the termite mounds never seem to be blackened. These structures look like little castles and are quite impressive. Why they aren’t effected by the fire is beyond us. We traveled on and turned off for the Litchfield National Park by about 10:30 am. Our first stop in the park was to see the magnetic termite mounds, different from the castle shaped mounds we had been seeing along the road. These giants are about six feet high and are almost a flat slap. The amazing thing is that they are all oriented in a north to south direction. The termites are smart. They build their mounds this way to expose the least possible surface area to the blazing sun. At the information kiosk we read about the variation in mounds built by different kinds of termites. It is truly amazing what these little ants build.
Next stop was Buley Rockhole and it was just as its name indicated. It was a series of little rock holes between cascading falls. Lots of people were sitting in the shallow water rockholes and enjoying the day. We soaked our feet and relaxed but decided to wait until the end of the day to plunge into the water. Not far from Buley Rockhole was Florence Falls set in the middle of a monsoon rainforest. There were double falls that were quite impressive. We stopped by the creek leading to the falls to have a picnic lunch and we got to see the really interesting pine trees that grow here. They have a bottle brush orange blossom that is just beautiful and very long, thin needles. After lunch we went on to Tolmer Falls. We walked out a trail with great views of the valley below to a viewing platform . This was the highest of the falls we saw today with the water cascading over two rock out-croppings before falling into a plunge pool. You can no longer walk down to the pools as there are two types of rare bats that have colonies there, but Mark and I did walk the trail to the top of the falls and then back to the parking area. We walked along the creek and then turned inland to see a fantastic Cycad forest. These ancient tree ferns are beautiful and they were a surprise not mentioned in the literature. But then maybe other people don’t get as excited over ferns as I do.
The final stop in Litchfield National Park was Wangi Falls. This was another double fall, but not as high as the Tolmer Falls. The falls ended in a wonderfully cool freshwater pool with crystal clear water and twelve to eighteen inch-long fish. Mark and I swam over to the falls and enjoyed the beautiful rainbows in the falling water. One little bit of excitement on the shore just before we went into the water was a little snake making its way through the crowds of people getting into the water. We took pictures and will have to look later to see if it was poisonous. Some locals said it was a harmless green tree snake and others said it was a high poisonous variety. Whatever, it had great fun winding its way in among people’s towels and bags that were left on shore while they were enjoying the water. Needless to say, make sure our bag was completely zipped and up on a rock out of the snake’s way.
I’m writing this as we are on our way back to Darwin. We exited the park and took an unsealed road for 42 kilometers so we wouldn’t have to backtrack. The road was a little bumpy, but actually fine and we saw a beautiful lagoon, some hilly country, and a field of fantastic magnetic termite mounds. We had seen these at a distance in the park, but we were able to drive right up to these and examine them up close. We’ll stop for dinner before returning to the Darwin Sailing Club and to Windbird.
We still have the rental car tomorrow and we plan to shop ’til we drop getting ready for our three month trip through Indonesia. We won’t get all of the provisioning done in one day, but it will be nice to have the car to transport the heavy things. The rest can be done next week by bus.
by Judy Handley | Jul 16, 2008 | Australia Darwin and Area, Sailing Logs Year 3 |
Day 67, Year 3: Day Trip to Kakadu National Park
Date: Tuesday, July 15, 2008
Weather: No Change, Still Beautiful but Warmer
Location: Fannie Bay, Darwin, Northern Territory, Australia
Right now we are sitting in $75 motel room in Pine Creek, Australia. That is $75 for four people. Not bad. It’s not fancy, far from it, but it is clean and has air conditioning and a refrigerator-and most importantly, it was the only room left in town. So we don’t have to sleep in the car. What more could a person want?!! Well, wireless internet would be great, but that is just not here. So this log will be posted when we get back to Windbird tomorrow night.
We spent our day doing the fast tour of Kakadu National Park. We are a bit tired, but it was a great day. We left the Sailing Club at 7 am and arrived in the Kakadu by 10:30 am. Our first stop was the Mamakala (Mar-moo-car-lar) wetlands. There was an observation platform that allowed us to view birds in the wetlands. There were lots of Magpie geese and various other ducks and water birds. The kapok trees are now in bloom and I got some great photos of the beautiful yellow flowers and newly formed seed pods. We then visited the Bowali (Bor-warl-ee) Visitor Center. There were wonderful displays of park wildlife, so we read as much as we could quickly, fixed and ate a lunch of cheese and salami that we brought with us, and headed on to Nourlangie Rock. We had been driving in flat scrub country all the way from Darwin, but the setting at Nourlangie was among huge rock outcroppings of red sandstone striped in places with orange, white, and black. Nourlangie, called Anabangbang (Arn-barng-barng) by the Aboriginals, was used as an ancient Aboriginal shelter beginning 20,000 years ago and there were numerous rock art sites. Some of the rock art was repainted in 1964. The Aboriginals say that it is tradition to do this periodically and it does enhance the viewing, but somehow it seems to be cheating just a bit. Regardless, we really enjoyed seeing the rock art and only wish we had been able to visit the other rock art site at Ubirr. Mark and I walked to the top of the Nawurlandja (Now-oo-larn-ja) Lookout to see the distant cliffs on the edge of Arnhem Land, to view Nourlangie in all its splendor, and to see the Anbangbang Billabong from afar. It was a truly awesome site. When we walked down, we then drove to the nearby Anbangbang Billabong and walked the 2.5 kilometer path leading around the billabong. A billabong is a wetland that is covered with water in the wet season, but looks more like a shallow pond in the dry. We saw more Magpie geese, beautiful osprey, lots of ducks, and our first red-tailed cockatoo.
From Anbangbang Billibong we drove to Cooinda. We had hoped to have time to visit the Warradjan (Warr-ar-jarn) Aboriginal Cultural Center, but it was getting late in the afternoon and we had miles to go before we could sleep. So we filled up the car with gas at the Gagudju Lodge General Store and headed southwest through the Kakadu. We made one stop to watch huge numbers of red-tailed cockatoos come in for the evening. You can really only see the red tails when they are flying, and they are beautiful.
It was a very special experience which made us glad we had decided to drive all the way through the park. Just about dusk we reached the first town out of the park which was Pine Creek. We had a great seafood curry at the Pine Creek Hotel right across the street from our “hotel.” We packed a lot of traveling into one day and will sleep well tonight. That will prepare us for our trip to Litchfield National Park tomorrow.
by Judy Handley | Jul 14, 2008 | Australia Darwin and Area, Sailing Logs Year 3 |
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.
