Our Yellow Brick Road – Part One

We arrived at the Dasi Guesthouse at 9.30 that next morning. It had a family area we could sit in, with free tea and coffee, so we dumped our rucksacks and got down to work.

As we saw it we had eight options for getting across the Timor Sea to Australia:

1. Passenger ferry
2. Cargo ship
3. Private yacht
4. Some other small boat
5. Propeller plane
6. Jet
7. Cruise ship
8. Raft made out of plastic drinking water bottles

We already knew there were no passenger ferries but Theo had found a company that had a cargo ship leaving Dili mid December. They had told him the only way it could work was if we applied to be ‘crew’.

Despite our chances being pretty small we had already sent our application in and he was following through. He was also signing us up for two sailing Facebook pages we’d been recommended: ‘Sail SE Asia’ and ‘Yacht hitchhikers’.

We had registered on ‘Find a Crew’ a while ago we knew there was one possible match so Theo was changing his profile to better attract that one yacht captain who was heading for Kupang.

My sister had found us a Cruise going from Bali to Cairns and their reply to her email was encouraging, if way out of our price range, ‘if they paid the full cheapest passenger fare of £1500 per person we could see if head office would allow a drop off in Darwin.’ A quick look at the carbon footprint of most cruise ships showed us we’d be better off flying from East Timor to Darwin. We’d feel the satisfaction of having ‘made it’ but we’d have missed the point!

Rosa and I spent time pouring over maps to see where the cargo ship ports were based in Kupang and Dili, and then we looked up websites that detailed the comings and goings of large vessels in ports around the globe. Our hope was that we would find an independent cargo captain up for earning a bit of extra money to cover the hassle of the paper work.

Rosa began the hunt for harbour master contact details…and she also looked into repositioning cruises. We hadn’t decided what we thought about their carbon footprint but if it was an option we could find out

We weren’t planning to look into propellor planes until we got to East Timor but it made sense to see the flight schedules for Qantas and Air North, the latter did have a propellor plane so we would also be heading to their offices in Dili to see which of their three planes they were using for that particular flight.

With the carbon footprint of flying, as I understand it, it’s the height at which the plane flies that causes the majority of the issue. Nearly tripling the effect of the planes impact and according to Guardian research it’s worse to travel at night?!

Anyway, our plan for this trip had always been to try our best, not beat ourselves up for ‘failing’ if we had to fly to get past Russia or into China…or over the ocean to Australia. All three were real possibilities when we started out. We were told that the Russian border guards may very well ignore our visa and simply not let us in. When we left the UK there was no land route into China from any bordering country, and the 486 miles of water between East Timor and Australia had nothing to offer any traveller trying not to fly…

I sat looking out across that piece of our ocean in the coming days thinking about the ‘why’ for all this. Most people didn’t have the time or money to get to Australia overland, it wasn’t like we were trail blazing a new way to travel around the planet – what was the point, other than the ‘adventure’?

The answer was slow coming because life is complicated…if my sister was ever hurt in a car accident and she needed me I’d be on that plane in a heart beat. There are some of my friends who so need a break from their everyday lives that I would almost buy them the air ticket myself. There are people trying to make a difference in all sorts of incredible ingenious ways all over the world who need to fly to carry on their work – if I had paid attention in physics lessons instead of mucking around at the back I could have been designing solar panels to go on the wings of planes and I wouldn’t have ended up sweating my way round half the globe.

The bottom line for me was that we can only do our best – not brilliant, not perfect, but we’ve tried…maybe some people will find our efforts inspiring and have adventures of their own – maybe someone would take the train rather than fly one time and the more we all think and talk about it the more we can support each other to keep trying in our own ways to reduce our carbon footprints.

For me this is a personal journey in a political world. I love my sister and I have never been to her home because she emigrated five years after I made the decision not to fly anymore, I don’t know where she lives, I don’t know her friends and I’ve never met the man she’s marrying in December and I haven’t met his kids, I’ve never driven my nephew to school or gone for a walk on the beach with her dogs…and all of that is precious to me, so I am giving it my best shot – it’s not perfect but it is interesting at least 🙂

By grace and bloody hard work we have got this far!! And it really would be fantastic to get all the way without flying. But life isn’t perfect and in the imperfection of not making it, of maybe having to fly that last but, is the hard reality we are all facing in every decision we make for ourselves and our families…

We decided that day, dripping away in the continuous humid heat that we seem to have been living in since leaving China, to do everything we could but to accept that there might not be a way across…and I’m sad to say for some reason my plastic bottle raft wasn’t getting any attention at all…

There was some practical ‘now’ stuff to do as well, I needed to arrange a lift to the ferry in the morning, somewhere for us to stay when we arrived in Kupang and to check out places to stay in East Timor.

I got a bit of a shock when I looked up hotels in East Timor, (whose currency is the American dollar)…$15 each for a dormitory bed was the cheapest I could find! The guesthouse I found in Kupang (…it was called Lavalon which felt a bit like home 🙂 was costing $10 a night for all three of us and we got breakfast…it might make sense to spend a little longer in Kupang maybe we’d be able to get a yacht straight from here and save the $30 visa fee non EU countries have to pay to go to East Timor.

We spent most of that day diving deep into the world of sailing and cargo ships – we wrote a bunch of emails to anyone we could find connected with ports or sailing in Kupang and Dili and marked all the relevant locations on our digital map.

We worked hard that day …and we began to face the end of our journey – Australia was only an island away.

Day 2:

We went to bed early (quite normal for us now) – breakfast of fried noodles and rice was at 6.00 and the owner of the guesthouse was taking us to the ferry at 6.15.

In the Pelni Ferry Terminal we met Nicholas from Belgium who had hitchhiked from Sumatra and Shirley who I recognised as the other person watching the sunrise at Kelimutu the morning we went. She was from China and had been travelling on and off for seven years. She had an effortless chic that made my horribly stained, slightly wrinkled and grubby clothes, my humid volume hair and my red sun burned face look exactly what it was – a bit of a mess! (…when were they going to make sun cream that stayed on when you sweat?)

To be honest I’d got used to looking like this now – wearing sunglasses helped and it was enough to do to manage the heat without looking good at the same time – kudos Shirley 🙂

We spent most of the ferry journey out on deck because the communal sleeping area was like a slow bake oven – and we liked seeing things pop out of the sea…

We were rewarded by the sight of a beautiful green turtle which Rosa spotted and I actually saw this time – dolphins and flying fish, a weird giant eel shaped silver creature hurl itself out of the ocean three times and then disappear.

Our best sighting of the day came in the form of what looked like a really large snub nosed dolphin – about twice the size of a normal dolphin, swimming really close – when we looked it up later it turned out it was a ‘Blainville’s beaked whale’ no one seemed quite sure if it was a dolphin or a whale so we’ve decided it’s both…

Once it got dark we spent the last part of that journey in ‘the hole’

I’m sure you could sell it as a weight loss cure because I sweated out at least four kilos in that five hours, it was not a fun or meaningful experience – it was just hard and hot and I was delighted when we arrived in Kupang at midnight, mercifully an hour early. We got a shared taxi with Shirley to Lavalon guesthouse and the lovely Edwin got up and let us in.

We had hoped there would be room for Shirley too but he only had one room…she and I went for a walk to look for another hotel and then she headed off by herself …a travelling style she was used too and comfortable with.

Our room was small for three but the beds were really comfy (Rosa had a mattress on the floor), the shower was a good one and the cold water so unbelievably welcome. There was an incredibly romantic view over the ocean from our window and hammocks in the garden – a wonderful place to base our hunt for a way along the final part of the yellow brick road.

Day 3

The next morning I connected to the WiFi and one of the people we had emailed two days ago had got back to us, we’d found him on a sailing website referencing Kupang port – Frenky Manafe.

He was offering to help us!

Over breakfast we told Edwin about our journey and our hopes of finding a boat and he was pretty negative about our chances. It was late in the season for boats going back to Australia, December through to March was cyclone season. That was a bit gutting but he also said he had a friend called Napa who knew the harbour master, he would ask him if he could help us.

We really liked Edwin, he had an easy warmth and a cheeky personality, he could tell a great story, made delicious pancakes and he had been an Indonesian film star in his twenties!

He may not think we stood a chance but his friend Napa was on his way round anyway.

We told him about Frenky offering to help us as well and Edwin stuck a pin in that!

‘That man is no good!’ ‘He pretends he is Napa and tells other people Napa is dead…’ blimey! Turf wars…were we going to have to pick sides?

He told us that Frenky wasn’t welcome in this guesthouse because of how he treated other tourists.

We said we would meet Frenky anyway but maybe we’d wait until tomorrow – give ourselves a chance to land in Kupang…

Napa arrived shortly after our conversation about Frenky, looking like the older Indonesian cousin of Barrack Obama.

We liked Napa instantly. He spoke simply about the port and how many boats there were at the moment. He told us one had just arrived with an Australian captain. He offered to check where the boat was headed and get back to us that day.

Frenky knew something was up – we’d gone from super keen to meet him to  ‘see you tomorrow’ in about fifteen minutes. He was only just up the road and we were too busy…?

It felt difficult but there was a lot to trust and like about Edwin and Napa so we stuck with that…

The day drifted on by, we did our washing and waited for Napa. We went shopping and made friends with the children who came round earning money for small bits of sweeping  and cleaning for Edwin – the family were living illegally in some part of the mosque and the money the girls earned made a difference.

I thought about going for a swim on the beach while we waited for Napa but there on the wall were a bunch of newspaper articles about saltwater crocodiles – there had been a number of fatalities in this area and it would be fair to say that had me thinking twice…

The crocs were huge and they had killed nine people in quite a short space of time.

Best not to swim.

Napa didn’t come back that day but he did send a message saying that the boat had engine trouble and no-one had come to shore that day.

We resolved the next day  we would go to the port ourselves and see where that yacht was heading…