Back in Indonesia

After lots of adventures, and lots of miles of mostly light wind motorsailing, we are back in Indonesia! The last jump from the Ninigos Islands was a windless 5 days and 4 nights under a full moon. In that time, we could only sail without the motor on for about 12 hours spread out over 5 days!

We checked into Biak, Papua (the easternmost province of Indonesia) on Thursday, with the usual Indonesian paper chase. It took us all day, and 8 people coming out to the boat with stacks of paperwork, but we got it done in one day. As has been our experience elsewhere, the officials in Biak were pleasant and professional.

While we were in the Customs Office and Sue from Ocelot and I were handling the paperwork, the guys met the head of Customs for the region. Commander Paulus struck up a conversation that ended with Dave and I coming in the next day to give one of our cruising presentations to the group of young Customs officers under him. The presentation had several goals: Let the officers experience/practice their English with a native English speaker, learn a little more about parts of Indonesia they don't have experience with, and learn something about cruisers and what they are looking for from a tourism perspective. Commander Paulus also invited the head of Tourism for Biak to sit in on the presentation.

Dave and I spent the morning revamping our "Cruising Eastern Indonesia" presentation we had done a couple of years before, and the afternoon given the presentation and answering questions and talking about what Biak could do to foster tourism from passing cruisers.

As part of the discussion on tourism, we asked for names of tour guides that could give us a tour the next day. Ha ha--they didn't have any! So Commander Paulus arranged for a couple of his young officers to use their day off and take us to a few tourism spots. Apparently the most touristic thing to do in Biak is get in a boat and go out to the nearby beachy islands, which we didn't really need to do.

We were keen to see the Japanese Cave and the World War II artifacts nearby. That was actually a very nice stop, and they are working to enhance the touristic experience there. Then the guys took us out to Pantai Samares. Pantai means beach, and there is a beach there, but the attraction for us was the "blue hole", a gorgeous blue freshwater swimming hole. We had a picnic lunch there and cooled off in the swimming hole.

We got an opportunity to do a little grocery shopping, and then yesterday morning, we were off headed west toward Sorong. Our first hop was an overnight to Manokwari, where we are stopping for a few days to do some sightseeing.