Our Yellow Brick Road – Part Five

I woke up at 3.40 on our last day in East Timor – bloody fridge!!

‘Oh and one of the quirks of the house is that when the fridge gets to a certain temperature it makes a loud beeping noise – all you have to do is press the second button on the left to turn it off.’

…or ignore it until someone else notices.

I didn’t try and get back to sleep – I needed to pack and my mind was busy! ‘Zen and the art of making horrible decisions.’ …is that a book already?!

We did have a bunch of practical things to do – there would be no walk to the port today but we needed to book bus tickets from Darwin to Alice Springs and on to Adelaide and then through the rest of Australia, which we had finally noticed was absolutely huge! It would take four days minimum to get to Sydney… and that was travelling on back to back sleeper buses.

The advertising for Greyhound Australia made their buses sound incredibly luxurious and comfortable, but I wasn’t convinced… There was a fair chance they’d actually be hideous, back breaking things with drivers who didn’t like poor people, and they would finally kill us off where the heat and the mosquitos hadn’t managed too.

I reckoned we should book two days and see how we went, I’d have to wait for Theo and Rosa to wake up to make that decision though.

…practical stuff over with for now my mind zip locked back to the day before and the heartbreak of every door closing and the “Destiny 1” …not bloody well being our destiny!

We had sat around in silence for quite a while that afternoon, Tracey giving us the space to face what we were feeling.

We all have different coping mechanisms for dealing with disappointment and all three of us have been brilliant at different times in the last four months. This one was a ‘hoozie’ though and was going to take the best efforts of all three of us.

I will go at it til it’s done, Theo will stay cheerful no matter what and Rosa has a grounded good sense we could do with bottling.

Finally I ask the question.

‘What do we all think?’

“I’m not sure the rafts going to make it mum.”

Our rafts inaugural launch had not been easy. Coral is sharp and there has been enough blood to attract every Australian shark/salt water crocodile looking for a ‘light bite’ in the  Northern Territories, assuming we had managed to get further than 100 metres from shore…

“Even if we made it bigger, added shade, found a way to take enough food and water, rigged up a sail and somehow got a motor…

…there is a cyclone coming…’

When life gets hard we look for solutions, and when it gets really hard and there aren’t any I look for a way out. …I would definitely have been the one digging tunnels with spoons in prisoner of war camps, ‘doing’ keeps me hopeful.

Theo never gives up around things that matter in the world but with day to day stuff he gives it a good look, and then once he has decided there’s nothing doing then that’s it, it’s in the box marked, ‘Past, let’s move on!’

I can only move on when I’ve worried the thing to death, shaken every last fibre loose and had a really good cry!

Rosa sits in the common sense place that I’m going to bottle…she’s sad, and wishes it was different, she will do what she can to change it and then carry on having as good a day as you can in 33 degree heat…

We all knew we had done our best as we sat there, surrounded by cats and pictures of British monarchs, knowing we had to book a flight with Qantas.

£207 each – four times more than if we’d flown from Bali, my sister had looked that up when we were facing a 54 hour boat journey to get to Timor, we could take a small crumb of comfort from the fact that we had spent the money and saved the CO2 but it wasn’t really stopping the heart ache any more than looking at each other and saying ‘we knew we might have to fly when we left England.’

We booked the tickets.

It was so easy, they didn’t even need our passport details. Booking the greyhound bus passes was harder…

It was done.

I lay there in my bed having gone over it all again – it really was time to get up now …it was light enough for an early morning walk.

I still held out a hope that Mr Fernando would ring us from the port  (…or Wayne ‘Destiny’ would miraculously have been delayed and had had a change of heart) but mostly I was trying not to let feelings of ‘failure’ take over.

I tried to be kind to myself walking on that beach, reminding myself of the good things – being in East Timor had given us so much inspiration and a deeper understanding of a struggle we had been connected to for twenty five years. The four month journey through Europe, Russia, China, Laos, Thailand and Indonesia had been more incredible than we could possibly have imagined – we really had done something to be proud of! …and yet, we would not have made it all the way without flying, it sat there like a lead weight.

Acceptance takes time…and if I’m honest I’m glad it does. If I was ready to skip gaily on to a plane what was the point…? It was going to hurt …I just needed to loosen the hair shirt!

When I got back we talked and I booked a hostel in Darwin and a taxi to take us to the airport – we booked our Greyhound tickets to Alice Springs and Adelaide. We packed, ate breakfast, said goodbye to the wonderful Tracey and all six of her cats and we headed out …to the airport.

It was so weird walking in to ‘departures’ – it had been 21 years for Theo and I, and the first time ever for Rosa.

It was a tiny airport which was a blessing. Luggage check in was quick, immigration was easy, there was some excitement in the form of a very angry East Timorese man shouting at two westerners about to go through and get on the plane – no idea what that was about, but it was properly heated and I found myself stepping in between them at one point (…still looking for a way out?!)

The whole process was way easier than getting on a Chinese train and we found ourselves in a stylish  waiting room wondering what our first flight as a family would be like. (Turns out it was going to be late, something no self respecting Chinese train would ever be…!)

I sent some thank you texts while we waited and discovered that Helen Hill, who had been our initial contact in East Timor, was going to be on the plane with us. She was headed for Darwin to see some friends and then down to Melbourne for Christmas.

She invited us for dinner that evening with a group who did solidarity work for East Timor in Darwin, she wanted us to sing ‘With my Hammer’ which helped somehow…

Whilst we waited Theo checked in with both of us – ‘we’ve made the decision to do this and it would be great if we could find a way to at least try and enjoy it’…this was Rosa’s first time in an aeroplane after all, and they are awesome.

We walked out to the runway and onto the 90 seater jet. The stewardesses were a perfect example of the genre and Rosa was both excited and scared – it really is a hell of a thing taking off in a heavy metal tube.

We laughed and cried as we soared into the air and waved goodbye to the Island that had so nearly given us a way across the Timor Sea.

Rosa marvelled at the clouds and just how high we were and we’d hardly had a chance to notice how delicious the onboard snacks were when we started our descent into Darwin.

It was so bizarre arriving in such a sanitised environment with no three day horrific/exhilarating sailing experience to get used to the change.

Customs and immigration were all done electronically – we hardly saw a human being before we were out into the heat of Darwin…we were here and that bird over there looked a lot like a parrot!

We had made it to Australia, in four more days we would be with my sister.