Wednesday
25th September
I am interspersing a few random local
photos. Just because I can…
So are we on the high seas, or at least
cruisin’ on down the coast towards Java?
Well no…we are still in Lovina, surrounded by the RallyFleet.
Our visas aren’t ready; our passports are
locked up in some large and nameless building in hot hot Singgarajah…and we
can’t leave without them.
Obviously! We were told it would
be three working days to get them processed.
We handed them in on Thursday evening, so that day is, of course, out of
the reckoning. But…Friday is only a half day, so nobody even looked at them
. I am assuming that half-day means get-ready-for-the-weekend-and-don’t-do-any-work-at-all day…
Maybe they will be ready this afternoon. And…maybe not. Poor Sam, our rally organiser, looks like
this
and not like this…
In fact, when we asked some of our friends
where he was, they said that he was in his office in a hotel behind the beach,
but that he had gone to ground and wasn’t talking to anyone. Wise move!
Last night we were invited to join two lots
of people for dinner. At the same
restaurant at the same time… I asked Pete which group he had said yes to, and he said actually he had said
no to everybody because we would need
to be getting an early night to leave at sunrise. As this was not going to happen, we decided
to go to the restaurant after all. And,
of course, both groups were there together so we didn’t have to make an
embarrassing choice… We had a lovely
time, lots of chat, nice food.
Denis (above) we had met on our diving trip. He is a lone sailor on a big cat, Manta, and
he speaks very few words of English. But
he is learning!! He has made friends
with John and Irina, and John*
speaks barely a word of French. He communicates with Denis by speaking
English with a French accent, and by lots of mime and body language. There is a lot of laugher involved. Last night I was able to tell Denis some of
the stories flowing around the table; he had been sitting there smiling quite
happily but not really having a clue…
Our local friend, also John,
who took us for our waterfall excursion the
other day had a pre-dinner drink with us and then sloped off to find the
martobak vendor. Pete has been searching
for martobaks all over Indonesia. We had
one in Kupang, but that is a l-o-n-g time ago.
I will try to describe this delicacy.
It is basically a pancake, spun out very fine, them folded over many
times and filled with veggies and goodness knows what, and then shallow fried
and folded again. Very delicious!
So there we were sitting in our elegant
Lovina Japanese restaurant when Local John stepped up to the table, with a
large brown paper parcel for Pete. THREE
martobaks, hot and oily!! Local John disappeared
in a puff of smoke… I was just a bit embarrassed, although it was very generous of him; Sailor John said, Well some people BYO grog; others BYO food! The waiting staff in the resultant were
unperturbed. They bought little entrée
plates and voila, martobak for seven!
Speaking of Johns…that reminds me that when
we had martobak in Kupang, at the night market, we had our Tasmanian friend
John with us.
We love having John as crew and companion
but…this time he was sick for two out of the three weeks, with food poisoning
of various sorts. We went to the same
places and ate the same food, but he was vey unlucky. Unluckier still when he got home and was
hospitalized with dengue fever from an errant Timorese mosquito…
* This John is actually Jon/Jonathan but
for the symmetry of my blogpost he is John…And he has one of the most interesting surnames we
have ever come across – Eighteen!
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