It’s been over a month since we left Phuket and life is great. All the systems on the boat seem to be working well, touch wood, we have covered over 1000 miles and we are now in the Southern Hemisphere!!
We’ve been in Indonesia for three weeks now. Entering Indonesia by boat is actually easier than we had expected. About a month before we entered we had to apply for a CAIT (a permit to bring in your boat and cruise in Indo waters) and submit an itinerary of our route plan. We picked up our social/cultural visae (valid for 2 months) at the embassy in Singapore which took a couple of days.
It was a bit touch and go when Neil rocked up at the embassy door in shorts and with his crocs on his feet which they deemed to be “clogs” and therefore unsuitable dress (a post-colonial hang-up?), but they let me in and he had to wait outside!! Anyway the CAIT is valid for 3 months and the visa for 2 months but both can be extended when we get to Bali. So we’re in and we’re cruisin’.
We crossed from Singapore to Nongsa Point Marina on Pulau Batam (Batam Island). We decided to have a big Saturday night out in Batam town, not somewhere you’d take your daughters but good for a beer and a spot of people watching. We had a bit of a surprise when we walked into a bar called the Red Cock (how could we resist?) and bumped into Mark Buckland, an old friend of Neil’s from Perth. I love those amazing coincidences! Mark was as amazed as us and we had a great time catching up over a few beers.
From Batam we headed across to the next island P. Bintan and anchored outside the main town Tanjung Pinang. It’s a bustling little town with a busy waterfront and a couple of streets full of shops. We found a fantastic veggie market, cramped and crowded and badly lit but with heaps of fresh locally grown produce that’s never seen a vacuum packer or a cooler. So different from the wet markets in Singapore where all the onions, tomatoes and cabbages are uniform size, just like you buy in the supermarkets! I also managed to find an adaptor to pump up our fenders which were beginning to look like they’d also had a hard night out in Batam Town! I was unable to find one in Langkawi or Singapore, I love fossicking around in these small town shops!
For the last two weeks we have been heading south and east through the Kalimata Sea between Sumatra and Borneo. We lingered in the Lingga Islands (east coast of Sumatra) for a few days and enjoyed nosing around small bays and between islands, snorkelling on the reefs and generally pottering around in the dinghy. We crossed the equator on 16th February and celebrated with a bottle of SSB. We had a 50 hour sail from the Sumatra coast to the Borneo coast and arrived in P. Serutu where we had a couple of days of well earned rest.
Probably our two favourite places that we’ve visited were the little town of Dabo on the east coast of P. Singkep and P. Serutu. The first evening we anchored in Dabo was incredibly still, the sea was oily smooth and there was not a breath of wind. As the sun went down the mist rose from the valleys between the ranges of hills which stepped off into the distance in shades of grey. The chanting of the imams from the two mosques in town floated across the water and blended harmoniously together. It was very atmospheric and very peaceful.
We stayed for a couple of days hoping to replenish supplies but all the shops were closed, I guess because it was Chinese New Year. We found a market and a coffee shop where we became regulars for a kopi susu and a bit of a chat. Neil’s bahasa Indonesia is coming back pretty quickly which was a help. The locals were just really friendly and it felt like half the town came to wave us off as we left.
P. Serutu is a small island about 3km long running E-W. There is a lighthouse on the western end and an abandoned settlement on the south coast. We anchored just offshore from a beach with the most beautiful soft white sand and a broad reef. The lovely thing about Serutu is that there is nobody here, nobody is watching you which is quite unusual in Asia.
Between the falling down bamboo houses there is a stream which we traced up for a couple of hundred metres and found a (very) small pool. It was wonderful to bathe in freshwater, very primitive squatting in a pool scooping up water from a trickle over a rock! We snorkelled the reef and, as in the Lingga Islands, we were disappointed to find the top of the reef invaded by a brown weed. The weed gathers silt and eventually seems to kill the coral. Further to the west the stronger currents had kept the weed at bay and the coral was thriving and populated by a variety of reef fish – much better!
After leaving P. Serutu we had another long sail to Kumai, a small town on the south coast of Kalimantan (Borneo). Since leaving Bintan we have had light winds mainly from NE and a couple of very still days. As we passed the SW corner of Kalimantan we were hit by a fierce squall, locally known as a Sumatra. The winds were up to 30 knots with heavy rain reducing the visibility to virtually nothing and wind waves of 2-3m. We reduced sail, turned into it and waited for it to blow out which it did in about an hour.
Just as we were turning back on course we were approached by a large local boat. They came to within 300m of the boat and just hovered behind us and on the aft quarter for over an hour. This freaked us out a bit and we started putting our pirate attack strategy into action (not including the cans of spam as we are in a Muslim country, we’ll keep those for the PNG pirates!). Finally they drifted away, perhaps they were simply fishermen with nothing much to do but watch Orang Buleh. At last we turned back on course, the wind picked up from the NW and we had a great sail round the point and into the Java Sea.
Gotta go! More soon!! Next internet Bali!!