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June 19, 2005
On Alor
DAY: 5
LOCATION: Pureman village - Alor Island
NAUTICAL MILES TODAY: 17
NAUTICAL MILES TOTAL TRIP: 39
LATITUDE :08degs, 21.51'S
LONGITUDE: 124degs, 57.93'E
We're pretty exhausted from the crossing so this will be a short one. Suffice to say that we're all OK and on the island of Alor in a village called Pureman. The crossing took a little over 7 hours, starting at 7am this morning and making landfall by around 2.15pm. Despite the fatigue it feels great to be over the second major hurdle of this trip - making it to the Indonesian Archipelago. Having negotiated both the border formalities and our first major crossing of a selat, I think we can start to enjoy the trip proper without fears of any major roadblocks (fingers xd).
For every mile north we paddled today we were taken west another mile by the 3-4 knot current. So we ended up pretty much at a 45 degree angle (to the NW) from where we started. The only sign of any of rip currents that we'd been told to beware of by the folks in Dili (and which can reputedly run at 8+ knots) was a patch of broken water of about 1/2 mile across that seem to run a little faster than the rest of the selat.
Ina was unfortunately sick for much of the trip - throwing up any food she had in her stomach from this morning's breakfast - and was a pretty bad way when we got to land. She's recovering in one of the tents as I write this. The only other major event was an Indonesian naval vessel passing to a mile of our stern around 2/3rds of the way across. If noticed (or did they already know of our presence?) and confronted it would have been tricky explaining where we've been the past 36 hours since crossing the Indonesia border in West Timor. So this plus the horror story of some Japanese friends of Ina's who were shot without provocation by some trigger-happy gun boat not too long ago gave us all a much needed boost of enthusiasm for paddling the last 4 miles to land in record time.
On arrival we were invited to stay at the village here, which has turned out to be not the best move. If we'd know we were to have 40 people (the entire village) gauping at our every move, even cooking a meal just now and setting up our tents, we'd have elected to stay down the beach a ways. But without knowing local protocol we didn't want to offend the village chief who requested meeting with us. So here we are, sea-sore and in a fairly advanced state of mental retardation brought on by fatigue, entertaining the local populace with gadgets and wizardry such as Chris's new Primus stove, our headtorches and of course this computer and the satphone I'm about to send this report back to the weblog.
There are no roads linking this place to the outside world and it's a day's hike to the island's biggest town Kalabahi. This and the fact that we were the first to sign the village guest-book - that's looks a few years old now - has us thinking that they don't have many visitors here. Excellent people though - extremely friendly and with a very jovial sense of humour. We look forward to getting to know them a little better - starting with inviting the Chief around for a cup of tea and biscuits - in the morning when we'll feel more sociable.
Posted on June 19, 2005 1:31 PM