Sunday 27^th September – It feels like a lot of water has passed under our bridge since Wednesday!!  The last three days have been non stop….

 

Wally, the bimini expert turned out to be a first class star – he is Australian and travelling around the country with his wife in their camper.  This is his trade and he sets up shop wherever they stop so we were lucky to find him and now have additions to our shading, repairs to the stitching, replacement poppers where ours had broken, reinforced lee cloths and heavy duty Velcro overall.

 

We have miraculously found another impeller for the machinater to keep as a spare, had the smaller outboard engine repaired and replaced a lever which was broken - found a dinghy repair man (there is no Zodiac glue available in the whole of Australia so we have gone for another brand to mend the split we have in the base of our ‘spare’ boat) – hard to find anyone to mend a rubber dinghy – they tend to have aluminium tenders here for obvious reasons……..crocodiles!

 

We revisited Mindle Market with our children and whilst some of us quietly watched the sun go down – others were occupied with more energetic events…..

 

 

 

 

Some were happy watching the sunset…..

 

 

While others revolved their psychedelic hippy balls…..

 

The spares arrived for the leaking oil seal but even though it was the one specified in the manual – you’ve guessed it – it was the wrong one – so one week later, having actually moved Mr Perkins, and damaged the gasket further taking the oil seal off, we now have a greater problem and being Sunday we can’t even order the new one until tomorrow.  Now we are on another time treadmill with the agenda for Kupang departure looming on Wednesday night to catch the tide…..  the elusive fridge parts have been found though and installed and only in the nick of time – the heat was making our one unit struggle but with two it seems happier.

 

We drove to Florence Waterfalls on Friday through the bush or outback – over a hundreds  mile of baking hot ‘wilderness’ stunningly beautiful with excellent roads.  The waterfalls are ‘safe’ and are a designated swimming area so we took a picnic and indulged……

 

 

 

Beautiful site with clean, clear, cool spring water

 

 

And fresh water fish…..

 

 

Clara on her rock

 

 

Vic in the waterfall

 

 

Paul under his tree

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

The magnetic and cathedral ant hills were amazing

 

 

 

 

Cathedral termite nests

 

 

 

 

Magnetic termite nests laid out like graveyards in the desert

 

 

We walked for just one kilometre along the ‘shady, scenic’ route back to the car to avoid the hundred step climb back up but in the baking sun it was enough.  There is a 32 kilometer ‘walk’ with camp sites but we’ll give this one a miss.

 

Most of the other Rally boats have booked up to go on two, three or four days outback tours but we are all happy with our one experience – it was marvellous but after hours and hours and hours of driving we were happy to get back to the relative comfort of our ‘home’.  We have pretty much all met up again now – Tipperary Marina hosted a great ‘sausage barbecue and bring your own salad’ evening and it was fun to catch up with everyone’s adventures. Pat (with the broken wrist) is back on Canapus, Bennett is back from Perth with his Julie, Cayuko and Penelope III have just arrived (the latter dragged her anchor onto the rocks and had to be rescued in their absence by a fishing boat) and Gaia have returned from the States.  We have all filled in our CAITS for Indonesia and surrendered our passports to the Indonesian Embassy for four days (scary) so the bureaucracy side of things is on track…..

 

This is the last ‘civilised’ port for a while so lots to do before we leave…..victualing and stowing takes on a whole new meaning with five on board!...... we have treated ourselves to one more luxury though – an electric all singing, all dancing, light up in the dark, portable back massage chair….. I think I am going to need it……