Riung to Wodong August 2015
After Riung we sailed onto Batu Boga, another beautiful anchorage. Here we met a few more boats coming through from the Australian rally. We only intended to stay a couple of nights, taking advantage of the crystal clear water to don dive gear and give MS’s bottom a clean. Fun cleaning the boat with inquisitive little zebra fish coming right up to my mask wondering who I was and Remoras getting a little antsy for disturbing their homes on the bulb.
Fishermen in their sanpans would overnight here and sometimes spend the day mooching before a night of fishing. Morg didnt hesitate to jump in the kayak and deliver bottles of water to them and spent time fishing with them too. It looked as so they were after the big fish, as they trawled with fresh squid probably in the hope of catching a big Spanish Macarel. It was a lovely surprise to see Alaeris come in, who we had met in Cammaray in Sydney. So we had a good catch up with Iris and Alex and were introduced to more of the rally boats. Warren and Alex had a good session on the Zapaca rum with the predictable result of Warren falling off Alaeris while trying to get into the dinghy, he wasn’t too badly injured. Batu Boga only accommodates up to 5 boats so a few of the rally boats were required to sail on to further anchorages.
Morgan off to pick up Dad at the jetty
But after 5 days here we had to move on. Next stop was Wodong, a few miles on from the town of Maumere where we needed to renew our visas. Here in Wodong was a lovely dive resort run by a local guy called Akermi-also the name of the resort. It had a lovely little bar on the shore and a good restaurant so we spent a lot of time here, met some lovely young Swiss people who were enjoying the diving and also Nick the young dive instructor from Jersey. It was like having a group of built in baby sitters at the resort as they entertained Morg most evenings.
Warren spent most of the time going back and forth to Maumere (an hours drive away) to try and sort our visa extensions. They drip fed us the requirements, so each day ever hopeful that we would be granted our visas, we found that something else was needed. Even when we were finally told that visas would be ready to pick up the next day, they neglected to tell us that we all had to come in for fingerprinting and photos. And we were just one boat, we are wondering how the 40 odd boats from the rally faired that were also getting visas renewed in Maumere!! Only thankful that we arrived before they did. I got five great dives in here too. Saw most of the ‘big fish’ such as sharks, a huge marble ray, eagle ray, giant trevally, lots of different types of box fish, beautiful coloured nudibranch, lion fish, stone fish and great live corals all in clear, 27 degree water. Most of the diving was done with Claudia and Peter, a lovely Swiss couple who were avid divers- amazing how there were quite a few divers from landlocked Switzerland. Well, after 7 trips into Maumere we were finally granted our visas and able to move on. Just as well Warren deals with these things as I would most likely have ended up behind bars. Haven’t heard great things about Indonesian jails.
We had intended to visit a lot more of the islands in eastern Indonesia, but instead chose to slow down and just enjoy the beautiful anchorages that we found along the north of Flores. The Spice Islands and Kalimantan will have to wait for another day. One place I definitely want to put on the bucket list is Raja Ampat which looks pretty special, from the pictures we’ve seen and people who have been there……………one day.
