Bali: living too fast
Bali: living too fast
A lot is being lost because I am living faster than I can write.
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Carol flies out tomorrow--Wednesday--and I plan to sail on Friday. Although my attention has been more divided than usual, I think the boat is ready to return to the sea.
The shopping is done; and I have learned that I probably will find more at Cocos than I expected, though getting provisions and water on board may be difficult. The only permitted anchorage is at Direction Island, and supplies and people are at Home Island, more than a mile to the south. Another Darwinesque row?
Water is my main concern because a leak that I thought I had fixed around the intake fitting to the larger of my two water tanks has recurred. I can only partially fill it: less than twenty gallons in a fifty-two gallon tank.
I still have ample water, with about twenty gallons in the smaller tank, ten gallons in two jerry cans, and, at the moment, twenty-five 1.5 liter bottles of water. I will buy another case or two before I leave.
To conserve water I am going to drink instant coffee rather than use the coffee press. The amount of water in the coffee will be the same, but the press requires extra fresh water to be washed. At sea I already wash most dishes, but not glasses and cups, in salt water. I’ll probably shave only every third day, and I will have to bathe in salt water. I’ve done it before.
Cocos is 1100 miles west of Bali, which should take eight or nine days. I read that there is an Internet connection there, so may be able to make a brief post.
Although many people consider Cocos their favorite stop in the world, I doubt I will stay more than a week.
From Cocos I will sail to Mauritius, 2400 miles west, or, if the Indian Ocean passage goes well--and the trade winds are often strong there--I may continue directly to Durban, which is 1500 miles farther. Cocos to Mauritius should take a bit less than three weeks, to Darwin a bit more than four.
I was in Mauritius in RESURGAM, and liked it well enough; but the present voyage is about sailing, not land, and I would like to beat the crowd to Durban and secure a place to leave THE HAWKE OF TUONELA for a few months to fly back to the U.S.
The weather around South Africa is unpredictable and can be severe. I had the strongest gale of my third circumnavigation approaching Durban in mid-October from Mauritius, and doubt I will have much worse taking my chances from a greater distance in early September.
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Even after more than three weeks in Bali, I still find it difficult to deal with the numbers. With an exchange rate of 9,000 rupiah to the dollar, 100,000 for lunch is only $11. We paid part of our bill at the Vila Sangkih in advance by credit card, but the payment at departure in cash came to 2,170,000 rupiah, which is about $240. With the largest bank note being for 100,000 rupiah/$11, and most ATM’s dispensing only 50,000 rupiah notes, that was a big wad of cash.
While most things here are relatively inexpensive, wine and cheese are not. Spirits are. A bottle of gin or rum costs less than almost any bottle of wine. There is Balinese wine. We bought some and it was undrinkable. I say that after forcing down a glass that subsequently made me slightly ill. So I will leave Bali with a bottle of gin, one of rum, and one of Jamesons Irish Whiskey (somehow I didn’t expect to find Laphroaig); but no wine.
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When I lived in the San Francisco Bay area in 1966-67, I used to take bicycle rides through Golden Gate Park, where at the west end, in a sand pit beneath a fake windmill, sat a boat. It took a while before I found someone who could tell me that it was Amundsen’s GJOA, the 72’ Colin Archer design in which early last century he and six other young Norwegians became the first to complete the Northwest Passage.
Those of you who glance at the Ten Last Books Read page will know that I recently read THE SEARCH FOR THE NORTHWEST PASSAGE by George Thomson, which covers the attempts from Frobisher to Amundsen.
After my first circumnavigation in EGREGIOUS, I briefly considered trying the Northwest Passage myself; but a man from Holland, whose name I have forgotten and who never got much recognition, did it solo and saved me cold discomfort. Instead I found wet discomfort in an open boat.
I’m not sure when, but the GJOA has been returned to Norway, where it belongs.
The British praise Scott, who tried and died. Amundsen was a truly great explorer, who succeeded both in completing the Northwest Passage and being first to the South Pole, and lived.
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Clove trees grow beside the Vila Sangkih and beside palm trees bordering the rice terraces below. Cloves were introduced into Bali fifty years ago. They were originally the most precious of spices, growing natively only on two small islands, Ternante and Tidore, in the northeast of the archipelago, and the control of them, along with nutmeg, made Portugal for a few decades early in the 1500’s the richest nation in Europe.
As it happened one of the books I took to the villa to reread was Luis Camoes’ epic poem, THE LUSIADS, mostly about Vasco da Gama’s voyage that started it all.
It is a great poem; and I once began to write a book I will probably never finish about Camoes and those few decades of glory, with a working title of THE PORTUGUESE MOMENT.
I must confess that I had never heard of Camoes until a Frenchman named Yves gave me a copy in Darwin in 1981.
I met Yves, who was a French trained gourmet chef at an unlikely restaurant called the Saint-Tropez, when he whizzed by on a wind surfer while I was rowing back out to CHIDIOCK TICHBORNE. With CHIDIOCK’s flat bottom and 12” draft, I had a much shorter row.
He shouted, asking if I was Webb Chiles. He had read of the open boat voyage. We got together several times before I sailed on, and kept in touch for a few years.
I think that luck is a bell shaped curve. A few people win the lottery; a few are struck by lightning; and most of us are in the middle. I have been told that I am lucky, which I deny. My luck is average. In making voyages and taking risks, you want to plan and prepare not so that you will survive only if you are lucky, but so that you be destroyed only if you are very unlucky.
Although I never heard him complain, Yves was unlucky.
He came from Brittany, where his father was a fisherman, whose boat was confiscated by the Nazis who believed, correctly, that he was part of The Resistance helping downed Allied pilots escape from occupied France.
When he became an adult, Yves built a Brittany fishing boat himself and started sailing. He was driven ashore in a storm on an offshore rock and lost the boat.
Later he married, and his wife was killed by an avalanche while they were skiing.
A year or two after I met him, he moved from Darwin to Perth, where he bought another boat with a partner, who proceeded to wreck it on Rottnest Island when Yves was not aboard.
Beyond that I do not know. He was about my age. He was a nice man. I hope his luck finally turned.
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The photo is of cloves drying by the roadside.
Wednesday, July 23, 2008