Sorong..Again.

04/02/20 Sorong, West Papua, Indonesia

Where has the last week gone? I can’t believe we are already into February! It’ll be Xmas again before we know it. Anyway, I’ve been pretty miserable over the last week, hence no log entries, as my knee and leg swelled up like a balloon stopping me from doing anything fun. When I did attempt to do something my knee hurt like hell. So basically I’ve been couch bound.

That doesn’t mean we haven’t done any cool stuff. We did end up doing a dive at Wofoh, which was beautiful as expected. Best dive in Raja Ampat? I doubt it, but it was bloody nice all the same. We did see a 1m long puffer fish which was really exciting and some huge corals. We also hosted a pot luck with all the boats since we haven’t done that in a while, which was really fun. Vanja’s Dahl Makhni has become a pot luck favourite and is usually the first dish to be licked clean.

What else, oh, my thumb went for a ride through the anchor winch the other day, which hurt like hell and I almost fainted from all the blood. I imagined the tip of my thumb being pulled off of the bone, which is how it felt. Luckily I have such good crew on board because there was a lot of blood to cleanup on the deck. Thanks kids! Of course, it wasn’t as bad as I was imagining. It looks like I’ll lose the nail, but everything else seems fine.

We drove the boats through this amazing 40m wide channel between Waigeo and Gam islands enjoying the wildlife in the forests on either side. We anchored on the Eastern side and spent the next day snorkelling the channel and enjoying some water sports in the lagoon. It was a great little stop.

Next was Waisai, the capital of Raja Ampat. This is the main tourist drag for visitors to Raja Ampat. I didn’t really get to see much of it as I was nursing my leg, but Vanja went to town to do some shopping at the fresh food market which she reported was very nice.

We spent one night at Waisai before making the trip back to Sorong. We needed to go back to Sorong for a couple of things, restock the antibiotics that I’ve been taking, get Wick to fix our new tables as one of them is coming apart and the other with the fold up legs is not secure enough. And we need to get new oars for our dinghy. I can’t remember whether I mentioned it before but Wick lent us his oars and said he would make us some new ones out of wood and fibreglass. So should be good to see how they look. The trip down was pretty slow going to start with but then we got a nice current and even some wind just off the nose so we could motor sail boosting our speed from a whopping 4.5kts to and even more whopping 5.2kts. A tiny increase, but it got us in 1.5hrs early.

When we arrived we were invited over to ZigZag for some sashimi from a nice mackerel that they caught along the way. It was delicious! I didn’t even put out our lines. We have discovered that we don’t really like fishing. Whenever I put the lines out I’m secretly hoping I don’t catch a fish, so it barely takes any excuse for me to not put them out. Today’s excuse was my knee. Easy.

09/02/20 Sorong, West Papua, Indonesia

Another few days have flown past. Seriously where do they go! We have been sitting at anchor out the front of the Marina Star restaurant in Sorong. We didn’t realise it last time we were anchored here but it is right in the centre of town, almost walking distance to all the important stuff like fuel, shopping and most importantly restaurants.

Anyway we tried going to immigration on the first day, but found out from some nice guy at the dock that it was a Papuan holiday that day and immigration was closed. So instead, we found a great little hole in the wall style restaurant and had a great lunch…and have been back a few times I don’t mind saying.

The next day we made it to immigration, but not to extend our visas, which we do have to do, but to ask them if it was ok to change sponsors have way through a visit. You see, we need a sponsor to allow us to spend so much time in Indonesia. You can get a visa on arrival from Australia and many other countries, but it only allows you to stay for 30 days + 30 day extension. If you get yourself a sponsor (for a pretty large fee of $USD125) you have 60 days on arrival then a further 4 x 30 day extensions, so basically 6 months. Not bad. We were unaware when we first chose our sponsor that they not only have to write a letter for your first entry to the country, but one for every extension as well. Not sure if this was always the case, or if it just came into effect recently. Either way, our dodgy little sponsor wanted another $USD100 for the extension letter we needed for our first extension. That would mean that if we wanted to stay in the country for the full 6 months she would make over $USD500 for basically printing out a piece of paper and sending it to the post office 5 times. A very nice scam. Well thankfully we are travelling with others and ZigZag’s sponsor cost them $USD125 all up for the full 6 months for 5 people. Well thank you ZigZag.

The immigration office was very nice and said that yes we could change sponsors. They seemed to know ZigZag’s sponsor well so maybe that smoothed the process over. We hurriedly contacted him and by that evening we had forwarded him all of our documents and the process was underway. This was Thursday. We really wanted to get the application in before the weekend so we were pretty happy the new sponsor was getting onto it straight away.

Friday came around and we were waiting all day to hear from the new sponsor. We couldn’t wait to get it done so we could let the old dodgy one know what we thought of her. Vanja had a scathing email all typed up, locked and loaded. We went for lunch at Pizza Hut of all places and the kids went crazy. The pizzas were really good, much better than the Pizza Hut back at home, if they even still exist. We still hadn’t heard from him other than a message saying he was in a meeting and he would head home to do it. We told him the immigration office closed at 4pm. So we walked over to immigration which was where ZigZag and Family Circus was, as they were much more prepared than we were. I know, nothing new there. ZZ were just finishing up and FC were done, just waiting for their passports. Not sure how they got their passports so quickly as we were told it would take 3 days. Anyway, it was our turn to go to the desk and time was edging closer to 4pm. We asked the guy behind the counter if he could start the process as there is a lot of photocopying etc to be done, in the hope that the letters would come. He said no, we would have to have the letters before the application could start. So we sat across from him checking our phones every other second before Vanja yelled out ‘He sent them!’, making everyone jump.

So, with immigration done we just had to do some more shopping, fill up the petrol for dinghy/generator, get some LPG, and maybe some diesel. Petrol and diesel should be pretty easy, but LPG is proving to be a hassle. Our bottles have a AUS/US/Euro valve on them that is not compatible with the Indonesian valve. We ended buying an Indonesian bottle back in Biak thinking that we would just convert our BBQ hose to an Indonesian one. But I never got around to that since it would only be used in Indo. I believe Malaysia has the US valve, or at least can fill tanks with US valves, so it would be a real waste to chop up our existing hose, then have to buy another one once we left the country. Anyway, good old Wick has these conversion hoses that he lent to FC last time they were in Sorong, and he also had ones that we could buy. The 3 boats decided to buy one to share between us. So now we just need enough LPG to fill everyone’s bottles.

Saturday was ‘fill all the tanks day’. I was in charge of LPG while Chris and George did their fuel. Decanting LPG from one tank to another is not difficult, nor dangerous if you know what you’re doing. Wick explained it to me in the car park and it all sounded pretty straight forward. How hard can it be. You put the full bottle upside down at least 1m above the empty bottle. You connect the US valve first but keep the tank closed in case there is anything in the tank. You then connect the Indo end of the hose to the full bottle which is upside down, and as soon as you can, open the US valve, and voila, LPG starts draining into the empty bottle. Every few minutes, take a screw driver and turn the release valve to relieve the pressure on the empty bottle so that liquid can pour more easily. Once liquid comes out of the release valve and no gas then your are done. Tank is full. Too easy.

After the first conversion hose from Wick had a faulty thread on it, the day was not looking good. When the second hose arrived and I carefully went through the steps above filling my first tank without any issues things were looking up. Until, it came time to disconnect the hose. I realised at that point I didn’t really know how to disconnect it. Was it just a matter of performing the connection steps, but in reverse? It had to be. So I closed the valve on the now full bottle and was moving quickly towards the now partially empty bottle hanging upside down, when BANG! The hose clamp failed and the tank was no spewing out gas like a NASA rocket ship taking off from Cape Canaveral. What’s worse was that all the kids were on our boat watching a movie when I was doing this (all parent’s except us thought that was a good idea), so the boat erupted into screams of terror from inside. After the the shock I jumped up to the bottle and managed to switch it off before any damage was done.

After I picked my heart up and placed it back in my chest and the shaking stopped, I had a look at the hose and realised that the end on the regulator that blow off didn’t have an actual hose tail barb on the end. It was just a threaded section, probably for some other type of connector. Wick’s guys had just hose clamped it onto that. It did occur to me to call Wick and check, but he and Chris from FC said that the same style hose worked fine for them. So, I cut off the mangled end and put it back together making sure the hose clamp was super tight. As soon as I connected the bottles this time, the same explosion of noise and gas happened again. Bloody hell my nerves were fried at that point. I called Wick to complain about the dangers of the hose and he agreed to send me his tried and true one that he has used for thousands of years. Ok. So after another 30 minutes of waiting I received the third hose. This one was way better. The regulator was a proper regulator with a barbed tail so there was next to no chance the thing would come off. I was still on edge though using it the first time, but it worked like a charm. By the time I finished filling my two 4KG bottles and half of Georg’s 5KG bottle it was time to go get a massage.

Chris, Irena and Vanja had just come back from theirs, so Chris took over the LPG while Georg, Sayo and I went for ours. Sayo asked on the way whether I like soft or hard massages. I would say that soft massages are more to my fancy. She made a sort of muffled uh-oh sound and said ‘well, these massages are firmer than the ones you’re used to back home’. Great. I’m not a huge fan of firm massages. It could be the lack of muscles, or not enough fat, but generally I seem to feel more pain than most people with this form of torture. And that is exactly what I got. I generally rate a firm massage on how quickly I want it to end. This one was almost instant. She drove her man-hand knuckles so hard into my calf muscles I yelped with pain. She just giggled and gave my foot a slap, presumably to relax it. A few minutes later my foot cramped so badly from the calf rub that I had to sit up and stretch it out. She just giggled and spoke Indonesian to the girl in the next room who was massaging Georg. They all had a good laugh at the wuss. Seriously, it was absolute torture. I couldn’t think of anything else I’d ever done willingly that had put me in so much pain. Georg and Sayo said afterwards how good it was. I couldn’t believe it. Vanja even said when I got back home how much she liked the calf massage. Crazy!

After the massage we went out to dinner with everyone to the seafood market where we went last time with just the four of us. It was loud, hot, sweaty, and packed. Everyone loved it!

So, it’s now Sunday night and we have finished up everything. We got our tables back, filled all the tanks, did all the shopping and sorted out all the bills. Tomorrow we head back to Waisai for some fun. About time!