Wednesday 28^th December

We are staying at Highland Waters, a beautiful little lake, high up on the Central Plateau.  We are reunited with John Miedecke, last seen getting onto a small plane in Misima.  To my delight, John and Catherine helped me find my ‘lost’ photos from my camera, and they are now snugly downloaded onto my computer.  I will try, at some stage to download some onto this blog… next step!  It has been great fun, scrolling through and looking at our beautiful (hundreds!) of visitors in the South Pacific islands.  All those cheery cheeky children!

I don’t know if I have written about the death of my Kindle.  It has frozen up and cannot be moved, re-booted, turned on and off.  I was devastated – my Kindle was such an asset on 2XS, all those books, ready to be read, not taking up cabin space, keeping me contented and occupied.  Every now and then, since its untimely demise a week or so ago, I  would take it out of my computer case and gaze at it sadly.  Presumably it could have been fixed, but maybe fixing it would cost the same as a new electronic book reader.  I was still in a state of mild mourning and indecision when Christmas Day arrived.  And Santa aka Pete showed up with – better than I could ever have imagined - a brand new iPad!  Weehee!!  I am so thrilled with it; it is much better than my poor dead kindle.  Catherine has one, so she and John carefully held my hand while I got it all connected up, with the help of their wireless connection thingy.  I didn’t know it was possible to use the iPad as a Kindle, but within minutes Catherine had shown me the appropriate app.  I went to bed almost deliriously happy.  Not only are all of my Kindle books there, ready and waiting on my beautiful new little gadget, it is all better – technicolour book covers, so pretty.  And, best of all, the page is backlit so I can read in the dark with no need for a head torch or reading light.  I think Pete is pleased that I am so ecstatic with my present, but maybe he is a bit anxious that I will never speak to him again, and will be totally engrossed in the many wonderments of my ipad…

2XS tale - I don’t know if I mentioned that we had many hours of officialdom on 2XS when we arrived in Townsville.  Customs, Quarantine, Immigration.  They were all perfectly polite but much more interested in searching and questioning us than we would have expected.  For example, one of the Customs officials, a very attractive-looking young blonde woman, looked at me sharply and said, “Now, when you were in the islands, did anyone ask you to bring drugs into Australia?”  What a funny question…as if I would say, “Oh, yes, strange you should mention it but Mr X on Panapompom Island gave me a big plastic bag full of white powdery stuff – not sure if I remember where I put it…maybe in the toilet cistern?”  Ofcourse I didn’t say anything so frivolous, but I did say, “No certainly not!  Have you met Pete?  Nobody would dare ask him such a thing, he is very straight, and very honest!”  She looked at me with deep suspicion and snapped on some latex gloves.  (OH NO!!!)  “Well, I think I will go and swab all of the bunks and couches!” she said.  She was very welcome to swab away so long as she kept away from me with those gloved hands…

We had actually heard on the grapevine that there had been a very big drug haul in Bundaberg, off a yacht called Freedom Friday, which had been in the Port to Port Rally, including the Louisiades, a few weeks before we sailed across to Townsville from PNG.  Our merry band of officials wouldn’t tell us anything about it, but they were certainly all fired up and ready to find anything out of the ordinary on 2XS.  They didn’t even have the pleasure of confiscating much fresh food, because we had eaten or chucked everything.  The only thing they took was a packet of frozen mince.

As soon as we could, we googled the Big Drug Bust.  Freedom Friday had been under surveillance for about ten months.  They had about $30million worth of heroin, and even more millions of $$$s on board, and they were nabbed when some people came on board with suitcases to remove the loot.  There were photos of the main perpetrators, some fun-loving young party-people from Spain.  They had been life and soul of the rally festivities, and were photographed, dressed very appropriately in pirate costume and waving wildly at the camera, drinks held aloft.  They will probably spend life in prison…