We are in Indonesia now but here is a short post on our two weeks in Cairns….

Thursday 13th to Friday 28th June 2019

In Cairns the locals were all moaning about the weather. How unseasonably cold it was, how windy, how all this rain was unusual for Queensland at any time of the year. We too were disappointed in the weather, the strong winds had prevented us from sailing on many days and had initially stopped us visiting Papua New Guinea and then many of the islands and reefs along the Great Barrier Reef. Still, we liked Cairns and within a few days of our arrival the sun appeared and shone for most of the rest of our stay. Cairns is a vibrant, optimistic city with a busy seafront promenade and swimming lagoon, some of its wide streets pedestrianised with banyan trees and mosaics of indigenous designs, full of shops, galleries, bars, restaurants, and lots of young backpackers.

Many of the boats taking part in the Indonesia rally were berthed at the Marlin marina in the centre of Cairns, so there was lots of socialising, meeting of old friends and making of new ones.We dressed up for the Pirate Party, friends on Hakuna Matata held a Swedish midsummer party (midwinter here in the Oz) and we went for Japanese and Thai meals in the Night Market in town.

Our main preoccupation however was trying to get our Indonesian visa which we’d applied for over a month earlier. Hugh finally managed to get through on the phone to the Indonesian Consulate in Sydney and apparently our payment had been declined but they hadn’t contacted us (despite having our email addresses and phone numbers). Another week and our passports and visas arrived.

In the meantime there were the usual boat jobs to do on Vega and a mass of forms to fill in, in quintuplicate, for our entry into Indonesia and more forms for leaving Australia. We bought extra jerry cans to fill up with diesel before we left Cairns as the diesel in Indonesia has a reputation for being dirty, plus an extra gas bottle as they are difficult to refill there. A trip round the clothes shops to update our tatty collection of shorts and t-shirts plus food provisioning for the four months ahead, cramming yet more tins and packets into every available space in Vega’s lockers and cupboards. We are told that the local beer in Indonesia is reasonable but wine and spirits are exorbitantly expensive. We contented ourselves with 30 bottles of wine, four boxes of beer, a couple of bottles of Bombay Sapphire and that bottle of Bundaberg Rum bought on the tour round the rum distillery but not yet opened (one day we may be desperate enough – apparently even the locals are reluctant drink it but it might be useful for pouring into fish’s gills to anaesthetise before killing them). We hear of boats who are buying cases of whisky and 120 bottles of wine or more. We are clearly lightweights but mainly we have storage problems on Vega; we are amongst the smallest of the boats on the rally which, looking at the participants list, range from 37 foot monohulls like us through spacious 50 foot catamarans up to one massive 63 foot yacht which no doubt has its own bar.

We had decided to do the Wonderful Sail to Indonesia Rally as this helps with the complications of applying for a visa by appointing an agent to work on our behalf, take us through all the form filling and help with the necessary visa extensions whilst in Indonesia. We already knew quite a few of the people on the rally of which there are now 64 boats, a mixed group of Europeans, Australians and Kiwis, and Americans. The rally starts in Debut in the Kei Islands in the east of Indonesia around July 22nd and zigzags its way west with stops at some remote islands rarely visited by tourists, a trip up a river in Borneo to hopefully see orangutans, and to end near to Singapore on November 10th. Although it provides a schedule with welcoming speeches and ceremonies and displays of local dancing etc along the way, it is easy to dip in and out as much as you like along the way. We don’t consider ourselves ‘rally people’ but this seemed a good option. I’m rather looking forward to the sociability of it and having someone else do most of the planning although it rather feels like having a package holiday with the rep organising optional excursions and entertainments. The downside, of course, will be that travelling with such a large group of boats if you all anchor in one place you may miss out on the really special experience of meeting local people on a one to one basis, so we fully intend to head off on our own from time to time over the three months.

Rally boats are strung out along the Queensland coast all heading towards Thursday Island in the Torres Straits, the check out point from Australia to the official start of the rally in Indonesia. A few boats will be joining from Port Moresby in Papua New Guinea and a couple direct from New Zealand. We have a large yellow pennant to fly whilst in port to identify us as one of the gang.

Excursion boats to the reef leave from the marina in Cairns and we joined one to go scuba diving. We saw green turtles and a hawksbill turtle, none of which seemed particularly bothered by us coming up close to them. Also larger groupers, small and harmless reef sharks, lots of colourful reef fish and some beautiful corals.

On our 15th wedding anniversary we took the day off from the chores and caught the train out to Kuranda. The train line was built in 1890s to connect gold fields in the hills to the coast and is quite a feat of engineering as it winds its way up the mountains through tunnels, across bridges, with occasional views down to the land below and the sea beyond.

Kuranda was a hippy retreat in the 1960s but is now just very touristy with shops selling clothes, opals, aboriginal art and general tourist tat as well as the butterfly sanctuary, koala gardens and rainforest mini-golf. We took the excursion boat along the Barron River to the top of the Falls. The guide knew where the crocodiles hung out along the river bank, snoozing in the sun. These are freshwater crocodiles, only up to 2 meters long and which prefer eating fish to people, unlike saltwater crocs which inhabit the river estuaries and coastline in northern Queensland and can grow up to 7 meters long.

Kuranda is situated in the middle of the rainforest which stretches 450km from Townsville to Cooktown along the Queensland coast, and is the world’s oldest tropical rainforest, ten times older than in the Amazon. After a walk we caught the Skyrail back down, cable cars high above the rainforest canopy.

From Cairns it’s still about 500 miles to the very northern tip of Australia and to Thursday Island in the Torres Straits where we needed to check out from Australia. It seemed increasingly hard to tear ourselves away from Cairns and by the time we were ready we had only two weeks left to cover this distance……