November 2, 2011

We are now at Admiral Marina in Port Dickson – about ¼ of the way up the west side of Malaysia. We left Singapore several days ago – October 27^th . Even though we are currently only about a 3 hour drive from Singapore, it took us a few days of sailing to arrive at our destination.  We only want to sail during daylight hours here because of the large amount of shipping traffic moving up with us through the Malacca Straits (one of the world’s busiest shipping channels), and there are also lots of smaller boats with long strings of fishing nets strung out behind them, much as we have seen elsewhere on our trip this year.  It is a bit too risky to sail at night, so we had to do day sails to arrive at this first marina.  We stopped for a night each in two anchorages – Pulau Pisang and Pulau Besar – on the way. Each afternoon at around 3:00 p.m. there are heavy rainshowers and a lot of thunder and lightning so we have tried our best to be at anchor by that time.  We arrived in Port Dickson on the 29^th and were thrilled to find it an extremely comfortable and rather elegant place.  The marina is attached to some very luxurious condominiums and we are enjoying the uniformed Gurkha guards saluting us as we go up the dock to shore each day.  There is a beautiful swimming pool, a couple of restaurants and a lovely, colonial style building that houses the complex.   Malaysia is a very interesting county – a mix of Malays, Chinese and Indians – with many of the women dressed in very colorful head-scarves and conservative Muslim dress, but many others dressed in short skirts and high heels.   It clearly seems to be a thriving economy. 

We took a couple of days off the boat and went down to the city of Melaka. It is just about  75 kilometers from here.  We took local buses (clean, modern, air-conditioned and very comfortable) down there to meet our friends Karin and Jean-Francois from the boat Intiaq who stopped there with their boat rather than at Port Dickson. The buses were clean and comfortable, but it took about 4 hours to go there as we had to switch buses at a town that was actually out of the way.    Melaka used to be one of the greatest trading ports in Asia, but it is now considered a tourist town.   The city is clean and attractive and very trendy, with a great Chinatown area, some old forts from previous Portuguese colonizers (they were also colonized by the British and the Dutch, not to mention being occupied by the Japanese during WWII).  There are lots of very trendy and fashionable clothing shops and art studios, but most importantly an abundance of delicious and inexpensive restaurants.  Once again, as in Singapore, we are finding the highlight of our day to be the food we are eating.  It is wonderful and you can’t go a block without finding several wonderful restaurants or food stalls.  Melaka is apparently a very popular week-end spot for people from Singapore who also are keen on the food.

We stayed at an adorable hotel in Melaka-  the Hotel Puri- - which was right in the middle of Chinatown and had beautiful décor in the lobby (old Chinese cane and inlaid furniture) and cool(ish), quiet, gardens to relax in.  The rooms were simple, but air-conditioned and quiet so we were quite happy. They served a wonderful breakfast in one of the inner courtyard gardens – complete with steamed buns, egg custard tarts, curried noodles,  fresh fruit, and lots of more European style breakfast foods.   Had our first pieces of toast in several months, so even that felt like a treat. We really enjoyed our two days there.   We decided to take a taxi back to Port Dickson which turned out to be a great idea – cutting the time involved in half and we had a lovely view of the countryside – stopping on the way back to buy local mangoes and about 10 kilos of other fruit.  

We plan to leave here tomorrow and continue heading north – hoping to be at our final destination – Pangkor Marina – in just a few days.  

L.

We've now been in Singapore for about 10 days, having arrived here on October 15th. It is hot and humid with almost daily thunderstorms. It is also incredibly clean, and green and efficient. Despite all the buildings and construction and highways, they have managed to keep an incredible amount of green space which really makes the city very attractive. We had Hannah with us for the first 6 days and we kept busy doing sightseeing and eating as often as we could in Chinatown, Little India, and even shopping malls since the food is so uniformly delicious here. It reflects the mix of people who live in Singapore - primarily Malay, Chinese and Indian. The Raffles Marina where we are staying on our boat is kind of far from the city, but there is a free shuttle bus that takes us the 15 minute ride to a huge shopping center (Boon Lay), and from there we have a very inexpensive, clean and fast train that takes us into town in less than 1/2 an hour.
We visited the botanical gardens yesterday with good friends of ours from the boat Dedalus and really loved it - the most beautiful orchid gardens you can imagine.
We have also re-connected with old friends from the catamaran Intiaq. These are friends that we met in the Galapagos and we sailed on and off with them for much of our 1st and 3rd years out. We somehow managed to arrive in Singapore on the same day - after not seeing them for 2 years. They sailed in from northern Borneo and we arrived from Indonesia. Small world?
Lots to do and see in this place, but we plan to leave here on Thursday and start sailing up the coast of Malyasia to Pangkor Marina. That's where we will leave Sabbatical III for the winter.....
L.

We have been in Bellitong for nearly a week now - our last stop in Indonesia. We have never encountered a more welcoming place. They have made all the cruisers feel so welcome - with huge "Welcome Sail Indonesia" " Sail Wakatobe Belitong" banners all the way down the beach and down the road for 20 miles or more - traditional dancing everyday on the beach - events and tours and meals for us every day. The people here are so friendly and everyone wants to take our picture. I think we must have posed for 40 different families already. The water is lovely and the beach is clean and we have been able to kayak everyday - early in the morning when it is calm. The weather is starting to change as we get nearer and nearer to the equator and later in the season - and we are starting to see thunderstorms almost daily.
Last night was the final event of this year's "Sail Indonesia Rally". We had a fun evening on shore with some speeches by local dignitaries (a bit boring), followed by lots of traditional dancing, and then very funny performances by various groups of sailors.
We are sad to leave, but it is time to get to Singapore with Hannah. We leave this afternoon and it will take us about 4 days to get there - with a few stops on the way.
L.

We left Kumai on the island of Borneo on Monday, October 3 along with our friends Tom and Barbara on "Gosi." We expected to to just go down the river to a bay past the river entrance and anchor for the night. But when we got to the river entrance the wind was blowing 20 knots and there was a steep chop. The steep chop made anchoring less appealing and the wind made continuing on more appealing, so we went on. There was very good wind almost the whole way to Belitung Island, off of the east coast of Sumatra, and we made such good time that we had to slow the boat down so that we would arrive after dawn (so we could see any reefs) after two days and two nights at sea.

This is the last official stop of Sail Indonesia and the island has gone all out to prepare a huge celebration. It is hard for me to understand why everyone is making such a big deal out of the 70 or so sailboats that will be here. The President of Indonesia will be coming for the departure celebration. Workers are completing a new jetty, erected huge temporary tents and shelters, paved the road, and generally have cleaned things up -- I think for the President rather than for us. Bali gets 2 million tourists a year, so why should 200 sailors get this much attention? Before we left Kumai, I picked up the "Borneo News" the leading Indonesian-language newspaper of Borneo, and there on the front page was a color photo of some of the sail boats at anchor in Kumai, with "Sabbatical III" clearly visible in the photo. There seems to be an impression in the Indonesian press that Sail Indonesia 2011 is a big international yacht race. But it really just a bunch of gray-haired people taking their time going from place to place.

We are close to the equator now (150 miles) and the weather has changed. We have had rain showers -- yesterday it rained all afternoon -- the first rain we have seen since May when we had a bit of rain a couple of hundred miles north of Brisbane. The boat really needed the fresh water rinse. We expect to stay here in Belitung for at least 4 more days before moving northwest to Bangka, Bintan, and Batam Islands, continuing our string of visiting islands starting with the letter B (Bali, Borneo, and Belitung), before leaving Indonesia and entering Singapore in about 10 days.

We will update the blog with news of the departure celebration in Belitung over the next days.

M.

We just got back from a two day/one night trip up the river near Kumai (Borneo) to see the orangutans in Tanjung Puting National Park. This is the main, and only, tourist attraction in this part of Borneo, and it was one of the things we have most anticipated on our tour through Indonesia. We signed on with “Herry”, a local tour guide operator who has a very good reputation among other sailors who have been here in previous years, to take a tour up the river on a local klotok (a wooden boat – see pictures we have posted).

The boat has a big deck on top, open, except for a canopy overhead to protect you from the sun and rain, that was our private space while our “crew” including a guide, a pilot, a cook and a “boat boy” worked mainly on the lower deck to take care of everything we needed on the trip. The klotoks are very simple, but felt quite luxurious to us as we are so used to doing everything ourselves and suddenly we had people making us food, steering the boat, cleaning up after us, serving us tea, etc. The boat ride takes you up a narrow river, lined by thick vegetation up into the national park where the orangutans live. The ride is lovely with many types of monkeys in the trees overhead, tropical birds and even some crocodiles and large lizards. Our guide was named Seapon and he is a native Dayak (an indigenous ethnic group in Indonesia) who spent 11 years working at Camp Leakey (the main site for the orangutans).

We stopped at three places over the 2 days and hiked into the jungle to view the orangutans who come down to specific feeding sites. They were pretty amazing and we took lots of great photos. In between orangutan viewings we were entertained by our guide Seapon and were fed wonderful meals. We anchored in the river at night and the crew set up our beds for us – thick mats on the floor of the deck – and covered each bed with mosquito nets. The crew sat and fished from the boat while Mark and Hannah and I had dinner and just sat in the candlelight talking and listening to the wonderful jungle sounds. At dusk there were hundreds of monkeys in the trees lining the river – including the fantastic proboscis monkeys ( they have huge long noses) and then after dark the trees were just filled with fireflies. It was a terrific trip.

L.

We had a great trip to Bali. Hannah was especially smitten with the place. We left our boat for three days and went up to a beautiful little village called Munduk which is up on a high mountain ridge – ringed by mountains and terraced rice fields. We stayed two nights in a beautiful Balinese bungalow called “Puri Lumbung”. We had a private little cottage overlooking the rice paddies with a lovely balcony and a big mosquito net over the beds (which was fortunately not necessary as it is the dry season in Bali). It was not a huge room, but felt so spacious compared to the boat. It had all the hot water we could use, a beautiful buffet breakfast….. luxuries that we don’t get normally while living and traveling on the boat. The grounds were landscaped so beautifully and we spent a fair amount of time just wandering around admiring the lovely setting. That area of Bali is known for great hiking and we spent most of an entire day with a local guide walking up and down the steep terraced fields, in and out of various villages, up to a waterfall, and through coffee and clove plantations. It was very beautiful.

We had to get back to the boat since we are not comfortable leaving it in any anchorage unattended for two long. Gwen and Don, two friends of ours who were baby-sitting another boat volunteered to turn on our generator twice a day while we were gone and keep our batteries full and our fridge and freezer running. Once we got back to the boat Hannah decided that she would like to go see Ubud – the center for arts and culture in Bali. She took a shuttle bus there and found a beautiful little “home-stay” in Ubud ($10 a day including breakfast!) and had an amazing adventure – meeting a lot of Balinese, watching a Balinese dance class and then arranging for a private lesson with the teacher, getting invited to the teacher’s house in a nearby village, attending a cremation ceremony and a wedding ceremony (separately of course), and just falling in love with the beauty of true Balinese culture. A lot of Ubud is very touristy, but she was able to find her way out of that stuff.

There were a lot of “Sail Indonesia” activities while we were in Bali as well. There must have been 70 sailboats from all over the world there at the same time - all in the same anchorage – all having started with the Rally in Darwin, Australia like we did. There were organized activities every night which were fabulous – Balinese dance and gamelan music on the beach for all the cruisers to enjoy for free. I had not seen Balinese dance for 30 years, but it was as beautiful as I remember it. The last night of the rally there was dancing and music and a big dinner party on the last night of the rally and we all enjoyed it –complete with crazy fireworks being set off about 10 feet from where we were eating- and funny karaoke singers with sailors joining in full voice.
We left Bali on Saturday (November 24) at 1:30 am heading for Kangean Island in the Bali Sea. We arrived there at 4:00 pm after a rolly sail with plenty of wind, and anchored next to our friends on “Gosi.” We were very tired since we had little sleep the night before but after a good night’s sleep, we got up early on Sunday (6:00 am) ready for the 2 ½ day passage to Kumai in the province of Central Borneo (Kalimantan Tengah), across the Java Sea.

There was lots of traffic to avoid in the Java Sea. There were scores of fishing vessels, many of them quite small and without lights. There was substantial international shipping traffic, such as tankers heading for Brisbane, that broadcast an AIS signal warning us of their approach, but also lots of Indonesian inter-island traffic without AIS or the internationally required sets of lights. These included tugs pulling enormous barges loaded with coal from Borneo. We had to scan the horizon constantly during the night, plus check the radar looking for targets. Night watches were very tiring compared to those we experience sailing across the Pacific Ocean. We often had to change course to keep clear of other vessels. Having Hannah on-board was a great help. She was with each of us for half of our night watch, scanning the horizon while we fiddled with the AIS and radar, or just relaxed a bit in the cockpit. We had enough wind to sail about half the distance to Borneo, motoring the rest of the time, which is about what we expected.

We wound our way up the brown water of the Kumai River, the banks of which are dense mangrove and rainforest, for 3 to 4 hours until we arrived at the town of Kumai about noon yesterday. The town is adjacent to a large national park that contains orangutans (the only great ape found outside of Africa), proboscis monkeys, and a variety of other remarkable creatures. The only transportation in this area is by boat on the myriad rainforest rivers. Tomorrow we will take a two day trip on a local klotok (wooden boat) to see the orangutans and monkeys at Camp Leakey and other research centers in the interior rainforest. We will sleep on the deck of the klotok, under mosquito nets. We will have a captain, a boat boy, a cook, and a guide. Should be exciting, and no night watches.

L. & M. & H.

We have been so busy enjoying ourselves with Hannah, that we have been terrible bloggers lately. Lots has happened and I cannot recite events now since we are packing for a three day trip into the central mountains of Bali. We are currently at Lovina on the northwest side of Bali after a surprisingly fast sail from Gili Air. We spent 8 days at Gili Air, a small island just off the north coast of Lombok Island, where we were able to eat out in a restaurant every day, buy mangoes, pineapples, and other fresh fruit and vegetables, swim and snorkel, and take long walks. Hannah took the 3 day PADI Open Water scuba course and is now certified. She did four dives as part of the course.

We will be in Bali for one week. There are 3 days of Sail Indonesia Rally events here, and about 50 sail boats are now crowded behind the reef. We will write more after we return from our Bali mountain retreat.

M.

We have had Hannah with us for 10 days now and have been too busy (and sometimes too tired) to write. We are having a great time - have sailed a few hundred miles with Hannah - through the Komodo Islands , past Sumbawa and on to Lombok (right next to Bali). We have taken her for a hike to see the komodo dragons, had some amazing snorkeling in the komodo islands, done lots of kayaking in beautiful deserted bays, seen wild deer, wild boar, and sea turtles, had two over-night sails where Hannah shared in the night-watches, introduced her to lots of other sailors, and we are now enjoying the resort atmosphere of the tiny island of Gili Air. This place is filled with backpackers and restaurants and dive shops. It is a little like Bali of 30 years ago - low-key and hassle free. Hannah is currently taking a 3 day course to get a diving license (that's diving, not driving!). There are tons of restaurants here , all overlooking the beach, and they are good and incredibly inexpensive so we have been eating out a lot. It doesn't get much better than this.....
(Our route with Hannah has gone from Labuhan Bajo (western Flores Island) to Rinca (western Flores Island) to Pantai Mera (Western Flores Island) to Batu Monca (Western Flores) to Pulau Medong (Sumbawa) to Gili Air (NW Lombok).
We will be here for a few more days and then head to Bali!

Our daughter Hannah arrived in Labuan Bajo yesterday afternoon. We have not seen her since December and have so much to catch up on. We hope to hear all about her year in India, her treks in Ladakh and Nepal, and her travels in Thailand and Vietnam. We got her off to a fast start -- sailing to Rinca Island early this morning and going ashore to gaze at the Komodo Dragons. Tomorrow we will move on to Komodo Island. More later.

M.

Komodo dragon sticks his tongue out at us (Rinca Island)

M/