Monthly Archives: October 2015

Day 69 – Getting ready to leave

Our last day in Darwin began. Slowly, we got up around 8am but Celia was already buzzing around, getting ready for work. So after breakfast, we had not much else to do than to pack up all our things that we had spread out over the last 14 days. While packing, we realized we still had a couple of items that we wanted to send to Germany but now it’s too late. The parcel is already on its way.

photo by woodleywonderworks

photo by woodleywonderworks

Everything fitted well into the panniers with room to spare (according to Flo). We had an eye out to pack smart so that we could easily get to things we still needed while storing tools safely in the panniers to not risk losing them at security.

I spent most of the rest of the day reading my book. Had the usual Sunday Skype call with my family while Celia arrived back and Katy made some yummy early evening snacks with cheese and olives.

Celia made a lovely, spicy dinner and we spent our last evening around the dinner table with everyone except Tig. Thank you so much Celia, Tig, Liz and Borja that we were lucky enough to meet you and had an excellent stay at your place with your amazing company and a whole lot of good food. Hope to meet you on the road or in Europe.

Day 68 – The Fault in our Stars

The plan for this weekend was to lay low and relax and gather as much calm ans strength as we could before what ever would expect us from here on out in the developing world. That, and the thought of the $60 it would cost, was the reason for denying the invitation to tag along to a rodeo that Celia ans some friends were going to.

Celia did manage to break us out of our sloth-like state for a while though: First, we went out to another local market for lunch. Nina and I had Lebanese food and a nice tropical smoothie. Nina got her falafel wrap freshly done just before they closed up, much to the dismay of the stall owners daughter, who was put to work.

After that, we extend our little excursion for some sight seeing to east point. Once again, Celia has proven to be an amazing host. This time as a patient tour guide putting up with my “sign fetish”.

That night we were alone in the house and thought to make use of the large flat screen and watch one of the movies we have been carrying around since day 1. We ended up going for two in the end, because The Fault in our Stars left us so sad that it needed some Brave to get us ready for bed without sobbing in a fetal position.

The Fault in our Stars is the first movie based on a book of the same name by John Green. We have been following and thoroughly enjoying the youtube work of John and Hank Green for a while now.  I especially enjoyed the Crash Course series, and by now we consider ourselves Nerdfighter. The movie was great, but so different that it is almost hard to believe it is of American make. Have a look at the trailer, but be warned: This is some seriously sad stuff.

Day 67 – Quiet days

With one of our hosts gone and Celia working like the most impressive worker bee, not much was going on in the house. Before disappearing for the rest of the day to work though, Celia managed to convince me to join in one more time for a walk through the mangrove to the beach. Nina was supremely captivated by her newest book that she passed on the opportunity.

CC-BY-SA 3.0 by Peter Ellis

CC-BY-SA 3.0 by Peter Ellis

The beach was again teaming with life, but to my astonishment, a whole different set of critters showed up this time around. Maybe it was about the different point in the tidal cycle or the progressing buildup towards the wet. Whatever it was, I thoroughly enjoyed watching thousands of soldier crabs give the beach these flecks of bluish purple. I even dared to join the others in exploring barefoot, after covering me head to tow with mud flung up from my jandals the last time around.

To get everything ready for the post office in the afternoon, I spend the afternoon copying. We took about 2500 photos in Australia, coming to roughly 64 GB of data (I want to keep the RAWs

Cooling down every once in a while

Cooling down every once in a while

for later use). There was no internet connection fast enough in sight to upload this in any way quick enough to our Amazon Cloud storage, so I chose a different tactic for the backup this time. We carry a 1TB hard drive as the primary storage, and usually whatever gets uploaded into the cloud then gets deleted from our active 64 GB SD card. With uploading out of the question, we chose to use cheap USB flash drives and mail the backup to Germany for uploading there.

Beyond the flash drives and some post cards, we needed to send another box home. Since Nina’s Companero suit is finally complete, her old pants needed to go. Some paperwork and even the much treasured Coleman Sleeping bag fitted in as well. The price would be the same, so I was quite happy that we were able to keep the sleeping bag – it for me symbolized a much needed turning point for the better on our trip and I feared that we had to just give it away.

Day 66 – Tying loose ends

MOAM

MOAM

We took the bus into the inner city today to get some more things off our to do list. Since we didn’t manage to get ready earlier (and I am reading a book that I can hardy put down), we were basically in town for lunch. Despite taking a sandwich, Flo convinced me that this will be our last chance to eat out in Darwin. So we ended up in this lovely cafe “Four Birds” and I couldn’t help myself but buy one of their amazing looking muffins. The lady at the counter told me it was chocolate with peanuts, peanut butter and “all the other good things” so yeah. Very, very filling, more like a small cake in itself than a muffin really. Afterwards, a French lady for the kitchen came out to talk to me because it was the first time she had baked these and she wanted to hear a customer’s opinion on them. 🙂

wohoo ... thousands. Wait, IDR

wohoo … thousands. Wait, IDR

Enough food talk. Flo then went to change our Australian money into Indonesian rupiahs and man, we got so many of them. As a rough guide, 10.000 rupiahs is one dollar. All money changers are vultures though, so we lost 17ct to the dollar compared with the current market rate. Imagine you would change $100 into a foreign currency and back again, you are left with roughly $70! So where ever possible we will try to get money from ATMs withdrawn straight from our credit card.

We then also proceeded to the Indonesian embassy and collected our passports with the Indonesian visa in it. Most tourists don’t need to apply for a visa before entering Indonesia but we are special. Mainly because we wanted a 60 days visa instead of the 30 days one and also because we are entering through the land border from East Timor. This means we are now set for the next two countries and the next two months. 🙂

Back in Coconut Grove, Flo decided to make nachos as a goodbye dinner: Tig caught a plane to Melbourne late at night so we had to say goodbye to him already. :S

Day 65 – Stats 102, Australia edition

Country data #2: Australia

Full screen version of the map

  • 7012 km traveled (6789 km of GPS tracked)
  • 26 travel days, 48 days total
  • $21.53 Average cost per night (6x AirBnB / room, 21x camping, 21x invitation)
  • 375.84l of standard fuel for $ $676.03 (5.36 l / 100km)
  • ~$45.72 for food every day, eating out 1/3 meals
  • ~$7.500 in total, excluding shipping, flights and stolen paniers

All $ values are converted to NZD.

Day 64 – MAGNT

Not all here is idle procrastination and tropical weather today. For the first time in more than 25 days, we woke up to a properly overcast sky instead of the usual sunshine and puffy clouds.

No idea, should read more ...

No idea, should read more …

We cut our good morning skype call with our good German friend Sven short when Tig offered us a ride into town. Since we have been pretty laid back about exploring the city so far, I hopped on to the opportunity to get to town and check out the Museum and Art Gallery of the Northern Territory. It turned out that I may have under consulted Nina on that decision – and most of that field trip was quite a drag for her, probably suffering a little from the after effect of the vaccination the other day.

The museum was nice, but nothing to get too excited about. The collection of aboriginal art was quite cool, but we were not in the right mood to engage with it properly I guess. In the end, we most enjoyed the exhibition about cyclone Tracy. This cyclone hitting the city on Christmas day 1974 led to the second almost total destruction of the City within 25 years (Japanese bombing raids in WWII marking the first one).

After a bus ride home, we spend the afternoon catching up on some youtube channels we really enjoy and got  ready to cook another dinner for our generous hosts. I am glad to report that the amount of cheese in Jamie Oliver’s Italian pasta dish was universally well received, as was the strawberry-and-ice-cream dessert that Nina added to the mix.

Day 63 – Last vaccination

Chilling outside after the vaccination

Chilling outside after the vaccination

After our very tight vaccination schedule in Wellington, Flo and I were missing only the second Hep A shot. It wasn’t required for this journey but if you have the second shot within 6 to 12 months of the first, you achieve what is basically “lifetime immunity”.

The shot itself was better than we dreaded (the Vivaxim shot was so painful) so maybe the typhoid component of the Vivaxim makes it burn so much and not the Hep A part. Afterwards, I felt a bit drained of energy so I didn’t do much. Flo, however, looked for maps and downloaded our GPS track for Australia and stuff.

It was quite loud on the roof...

It was quite loud on the roof…

The evening was exciting as we had proper tropical rain and all the frogs came out to rejoice. 🙂

Day 62 – Deckchairs

We had a very quiet start today, with the party last night and all. With fist week wrapping up, we are finally getting towards the latter end of our current to do list, so the bouts of downtime in between are getting longer now.

Finishing touches

Finishing touches

A while back we talked about the foods Nina and I are good at making. I already got to dish up my green bean salad, so today it was Nina’s turn. We spend some time in the kitchen to whip up Nina’s renown mole hill cake.

The afternoon was very low key, with Tig and Celia’s  on their first ride out together on their postie bikes. Tig thought this to be a grand occasion to test out their blue tooth intercoms as well. That in turn led to some bemusing sights in the living room.

We got served a nice dinner again compliments of Celia and had the cake served up and devoured just in time before we had to head out for the event of the night. The cake was received with much appraise (would you have expected anything else from Nina?).

The aforementioned event was to head out to town and see the documentary Iris in the deck chair cinema. During the dry, there is an outdoor movie theater set up on the waterfront in downtown Darwin. As if that was not chilled out enough, most of the seating is comprised of laid back deck chairs.

Day 61 – 2nd Month-y-versary

Taadaaaa! Second Month-y-versary. Man, time flies (except when you are waiting on the bike).

We hadn’t planned anything special for today but were super lucky because Liz and Borja asked us if we wanted to tag along to Berry Springs. These springs are a bit outside of Darwin, maybe 50 or 60km. Without a bike we have no easy means of making it there. So of course, we said yes.

On the way there, Liz was reading up on the Territory Wildlife Park which is around the corner. The feeding of the stingrays was announced to be at 1.10pm and she really wanted to go. Again, we tagged along and so all four of us went into the wildlife park.

A train thingy! Tshoo-tshoo!

A train thingy! Tshoo-tshoo!

A little train is going around in circles in the park, transporting visitors to different stops with different attractions. Flo and I hopped out at the Monsoon Forest Walk to attend the Forest Frenzy at 1.10pm while Liz and Borja went to see the stingrays. We decided to meet up again at 2pm on the Flight Deck to watch the Nature Display of the big, predatory birds.

The Monsoon Walk itself was lovely and we saw quite some birds. The first station was a simulation of the rain during the wet season. For the birds on display here, I really liked the crimson finches which were intensely red in the sunshine. Some of them were having a bath when we watched. So cute! It also was the first time we managed to see a kingfisher. We, then, had to hurry a bit to make it to the feeding.

"I am a tree" ... "You can't see me"

“I am a tree” … “You can’t see me”

Many pigeons and lorakeets attended the feeding as well as black birds that would swoop down to catch meal worms out of the air (they were being thrown…obviously, worms can’t fly). My absolute favorite bird was Mumbles, the tawny frogmouth. She was sitting only inches away from us, waiting until it was her turn to be shown and explained. She’s a bit of an odd case as she’s a runt and has been trained to be okay with daylight despite being a nocturnal bird. The only defense mechanism that frogmouths employ is to try and look like a branch from above. Mumbles demonstrates this nicely.

Flo and I decided to walk to the flight deck instead of taking the train. This lead to us having to hurry a bit which in turn caused all my insect bites to itch like hell in the sun and heat. I was very much looking forward to cooling them later on.

Ranger and a cool owl

Ranger and a cool owl

The flight show was amazing. The ranger showed us a buzzard that is smart enough to use stones to crack open emu eggs, a large stork that lives in the Northern Territory and a bird of prey that emerges itself into water in order to catch fish. So awesome.

Afterwards, we visited the nocturnal house where we saw another tawny frogmouth, a small nocturnal wallaby and other very cute looking animals. The bats had just been fed and were hanging next to their fruit kebabs.

*lol* The crocodile was very passive even in the face of a small child

*lol* The crocodile was very passive even in the face of a small child

Another stop at the aquarium to check out the crocodiles and fish before heading off to Berry Springs. Getting there, the springs turned out to be a bit of a disappointment and we were glad that we had spent so much time in the wildlife park. One of the pools was closed off to the public, the other one was quite full and the water rather murky so that snorkeling didn’t make much sense and we had just one swim before heading back to Darwin. The other not so nice thing was a health warning about the water, so you weren’t supposed to put your head into it.

Back at Darwin, Celia and Tig had a little pool party going which we joined after a short nap.

 

Day 60 – Ticking boxes

Although the bike was gone, we could not wholly pop our legs up and relax quite yet. Nina (smartly) wanted some other things wrapped up before the weekend. But not after the most important task of the day, of course: prepare good food!

Earlier this week I promised the house a nice German green bean salad. The ingredients were in the fridge since yesterday, so I felt like getting the prep done before anything else today. The longer it can rest, the better!

Nina used the time to organize us some flights to Dili in East Timor. The cheapest ones are for the 12th. Since the bike is due to arrive on the 15th (I believe it when I see it), that gives us ample time to get our bearings before hand.

After that was out of the way, we could kindly borrow Celia and Tig’s car to get to town. The staff at the Indonesian Consulate was super nice and friendly and we got everything lined up in no time. Normally one requires return tickets for the visa, but our carnet and a written guarantee to leave the country again (plus show of sufficient funds) got us over that bump without issue.

On the way back we picked up a paper map of East Timor. A blue mood crept over us when we looked at our remaining funds back in the embassy, so we were not up for any sightseeing today (stay tuned on that, the correct term should be “suspiciously low funds”).

Before calling it a day, we followed Celia’s recommendation and had a brief excursion down to the beach through the mangrove that starts right next to the house. It was pretty cool to see the abundance of life in the salty muddy wetland. With every step we took, birds crabs and mud skippers hurried away from underfoot, until we broke out of the grove and onto the tidal beach propper.

The salad was a hit (*sigh of relief*) – Tig had to leave early for the night shift, but the rest of us current inhabitants made the best of it and emptied the odd bottle in his stead.