Monday, October 27, 2008

October 15, 2008 - Serangan, Bali, Indonesia

It is hotter than hell here. During the entire three months that we have been in Indonesia, it has always been warm, but something changed three days ago, and now it is unbearable. Sleep is elusive. Just existing is exhausting. Sten sweats through two to three shirts a day. It is so humid that the wind doesn't so much caress our skin as lick it. It appears that the wet season is upon us.

We'll be leaving to head to Singapore on October 27th or 28th. In the meantime, we'll be spending the next 12 days on a whirlwind tour of Bali and Java with my father, who is arriving this evening. Our visas expire the day Dad leaves, so we need to be ready to go the following day. When we aren't hiding out from the heat in air conditioned shops and restaurants, we've been preparing Mata'irea for the run north. There won't be much wind and we expect to have to motor much of the time, so Sten has made a dozen runs to the closest gas station to ensure that we will leave Bali with extremely full tanks. The station is only accessible from the harbor at high tide, and he often ends up wading to and from the dinghy with full jerry cans. Lugging the jerries and siphoning the fuel is an awful lot of work in this heat, but the price at the station is half that at the Bali Marina fuel dock.

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