Where have all the parrots gone?

The next door neighbours pig is squealing, the five o’clock call to prayer has woken up everyone in down town Dili, including our host Tracey, the British Honorary Consul, and her menagerie of cats who think it’s definitely time to be fed…but there are no parrots, not a single one.

I am missing their squawking voices now so familiar to me …and I smile  to myself, I’m grateful that they did become familiar – they became part of my everyday life, maybe they will stick around inside my memory a bit longer than if I’d gone to Oz for a three week holiday (…fair exchange for not having any savings or job to go back to : )

So, this is it…the long trek home begins.

We’ve already travelled over 2,000 miles but somehow Australia was still part of seeing Ellie and that’s behind us now…

So what’s ahead?

A twelve hour bus ride from Dili to Kupang (which is where I am right now  writing this 🤪 …with luckily, only three more hours to go!)

I’ve just had a tearful moment looking at our girl – eyes closed, knackered from the one day fever and diarrhoea episode she had yesterday…loving her vulnerability and strength.

I turn to Theo with tears in my eyes and we hold hands looking at our Rosa…she was the one picking me up off the floor this morning when I realised I’d left our black fisherman’s hat in the taxi, with the jar of New Zealand marmite in it that Tracey had given us as our leaving pressie. I’d been in a rush to get out of the taxi because the woman who sold us the bus ticket said ‘be here for 7.30 but the bus leaves at 9.00’…because it was raining really hard and Theo couldn’t walk we’d booked a taxi,  compromising and arrived just before 8.00. I rushed out to let them know we’d arrived, just in case the bus was about to leave, and left the hat in the foot well. Normally our idiot checks would have found that hat…but not this time.

We all love that hat, it’s Theo’s stage hat and I’ve been wearing it for five months now after the ‘sun burn on the Pelni Ferry to Labuan Bajo’ experience – maybe it’ll look good on its new East Timorese taxi owner, but it’s taken me a good few hours to let it go. Tracey arriving on the back of a scooter with Mr Visenti to bring us another jar of marmite did really cheer us up, but what was going on?

Since we left Ellie’s we have not been as on it as we normally are – we’ve left a scarf at Gabriel’s, thought we’d lost my money belt (actually carefully and thoughtfully stashed when we arrived in Melbourne, but only discovered after I’d asked Ellie to go through her bins at home – bet she’s feeling a bit happier we’ve gone now : )

Then my ‘Elaine cardigan’, easy to wear, long and dark blue, found when I went through her ‘op shop’ clothes – perfect as a lightweight cardigan that covers me up…I remember where I left it and emailed the cultural centre and they are sending it back to me, after it’s Uluru adventure, but in the meantime our idiot checks have discovered Rosa’s headphones, our shampoo and Theo’s wallet, but the ‘losing’ streak continues – today it’s the hat, the marmite, and as I have just discovered, my charging lead…

I’m not sure what to do to stop the rot but I’ve had enough of losing things (…although the scarf, cardigan and money belt are not lost – and to be fair we know exactly where the hat is too : )

Maybe it’s an extended lesson in letting go …I love those.

I expect I’ll be letting go of my insides in 36 short hours when we board our ship to Jakarta – there are storms every day at the moment. They are meant to be over by this time in March but not this year – two and a half, long, days on a ferry…why are we doing this again?

Back at Ellie’s the three of us had had a serious talk about the route home. There is a daily flight to Bali from Darwin, for less than half the price of the plane to Dili.

We would save ourselves money on the airfare, money on visas for East Timor, and transport costs – about £500 I calculated. We would also gain a week which might just be the slack in the system we needed at some point on our journey. We would also miss a twelve hour bus ride and a three day ferry crossing if we went that way…

But the plane journey to Bali was more than double the carbon footprint of our little flight to Dili, and it only flies at night – which increases the impact of the CO2 released according to an article I read online.

What to do?  Maybe if the ferry is calm, or we see a whale doing a back flip, or the three of us being violently ill for three days turns into a good story I will be glad we made the decision we did – for now I will have to content myself with being proud of us all, because when it came down to it we didn’t want to get on that flight to Bali and that brave (?!) decision led to our first bit of magic…

When we arrived in Darwin we stayed for two days with Cath, a friend of Megan’s (John Seed’s partner). Cath was such a joy to be with…easy, smart, organised and really interesting. I got to go for an early morning walk on the beach with her and her dog Hunter, keeping an eye out for crocodiles (…and even though we didn’t see one that morning she shared a photo of the day she did see one : )

It was early enough that the heat wasn’t too intense and the warm water lapping at our feet very pleasant.

There was a beautiful piece of rainbow hanging in the clouds over the sea that morning and I stood and thought about Jon, a wonderful man, a friend back in the UK who had lost his battle with cancer – it was his funeral the next day and I wanted to send our love to him and his family, 8,000 miles away. Jon loved to travel so a rainbow on a Darwin beach as we hunted for crocodiles felt right.

♥️🧡💛 

Later that day Rosa and I went to another place crocodiles hang out, and went for a long walk along a sand bar and got partially cut off by the tide (which apparently is when the crocodiles like to come and get you…in the shallows!!)

We looked at each other and then went for it, it was only going to get deeper – we had literally crossed this bit of sand ten minutes ago and now it was under four inches of water. We splashed our way through the fifty feet or so of returning tide, feeling pretty tense, we did not hang about… and for once I was delighted there was no wildlife.

Those two days with Cath were just what we needed at the end of four days sleeping on a bus or in a car (or on a tarp by the side of the car). Great food, great company and a deeper understanding of what life is like for the people who live in Darwin…

We got to the airport the next morning at 5.00 am – (thanks for the lift Cath!) We checked in, argued with the boarding people about having to leave behind all our bottles of sun cream/mouth wash/Prosecco – a gift for Tracey/Theo’s Indonesian knee medicine for inflammation (mostly turmeric and ginger I think and Cath swears by it). They were going to make us throw it all away.

Really?!

I went back down to baggage check in to see if I could get the offending bag onto the plane and a kind stewardess checked it in for us, free of charge, even though we had been over our weight limit slightly with our rucksacks!

When I got back upstairs we went through duty free (where I could have bought three flippin’ bottles of Prosecco and taken them on the plane) and sat in departures. I looked around and could only see six other people. Were there really only going to be nine of us on this plane?!

The call to board came after another half an hour and we walked out onto the run way …and there she was… our E120 propeller plane!!

I knew that plane so well, I’d looked at loads of pictures of it – I had rung and emailed Airnorth almost exactly a year ago about this plane because it was more fuel efficient and flew at a lower altitude…

How had this happened?

After it was clear that the cargo ships were not going to come through for us I had emailed Pete, my contact at Airnorth, to see when that plane might be scheduled but he had (very regretfully) told me that there were definitely not going to be any prop plane departures scheduled in the next month. All the planes had more than 30 bookings…but there, sat on the runway was the beautiful E120, propellers glistening, was that really our plane?

We headed towards it half expecting someone to come and tell us we were going towards the wrong plane, but no, it really was for us… It was a little shabby inside but I was in love and didn’t care – our prop plane!!

There was a moment when we all wondered if the ‘shuddering’ might win out over the ‘lifting off’ but she smashed it …despite being mega noisy and having been round the block a few times our E120 flew straight and true, and because it wasn’t a jet it could fly in a straight line over the mountains of East Timor, both a more stunning and direct route.

Our little prop plane got us there with a lower carbon footprint…and the pilots name?

WAYNE!!

Can you actually believe it? Wayne the plane came through for us…

(Well, actually I have no idea what the pilots name was, I didn’t ask, but it might have been Wayne! …and the stewardesses name was Angie, everyone needs a little angel in their lives!)

…and, if the saints of travel, the propellor plane fairies, or the gods and goddesses of our spiralling universe, require a hat, a scarf, some marmite, a cardigan, some suntan lotion (not everything made it back into the offending bag) …and a charging cable in order to perform magic…then I reckon it was a fair exchange!

(…and if you are listening fairies please can you make our ferry crossings calm).