The yacht maintenance is within striking distance now. With a good run at it I’m confident we’d get it in the water quickly enough, as this New Year kicks into gear. Sounds like good news? Not so fast.
Over the Christmas and NY period I had the lovely privilege of house-sitting for Lyndon and Gabby who flew to family in Adelaide for the period. It was a very quiet week (or so), with a bit of reading, a few dips in the pool, and more TV than I care to admit (especially since I actually dislike TV!). None of which was at all note-worthy. Really only the weather (ironically) was worth “writing home about”. Darwin storms really are a wonder to behold, at least for a southerner like me. Hot and humid, the wind builds an intensity to almost knock you down, and then out of nowhere a dump of rain so thick that the whole thing is like being in a washing machine.
But that week hiding from the proverbial washing machine came to an end, and I’m back at the yacht with Allan. The washing-machine weather continues, even though the house-sit has concluded. And the weather has had even more significant impact on my plans.
We talked it through last night, and it is Allan’s considered option that this weather will almost certainly last out the season – several months more of wet, windy, cyclonic conditions. All making the 3-day sailing trip to Timor impossible.
So, after already almost two months of waiting, the yacht transit is now officially off. Very disappointing, as I was really looking forward to the sailing itself as much as the practical help it represented.
I had also been waiting for nonsense Covid “vax”* restrictions to lift in Timor Leste and Indonesia. I’ve heard rumour (thanks Alex!) just now that Indonesia has done just that, so now have some homework to check for the same in TL too. That gnarly little issue of being unvaxxed had originally just helped me find patience around the slow yacht maintenance.
So one way or the other, the new plan is to put the bike on a commercial liner, and fly to that destination. Shame. Really wanted to avoid planes for this adventure, but clearly this will need to be an exception. The question remains – can I fly to Timor Leste and ride from there, or will vaccine restrictions force me to Singapore instead? My next steps are to pick up on the earlier leads in this space, and drive that question to ground with a booking to get this adventure back on the road. Can’t wait!
I will keep you posted.
. * Others will no doubt raucously disagree with me calling these restrictions “nonsense”. Did you know that the World Health Organisation changed their definition of “vaccine” in Feb 2022, in order to justify calling these recent injections a “covid vaccine”? WHO previously defined a vaccine as a “product to… produce immunity to a specific disease” (emphasis mine), but last year they removed the word “immunity”, watering it down in favour of emphasis on the body’s own immune system. Every previous vaccine passed that original definition, but none of the current crop do. Nothing fishy there, right?! Frankly I’m comfortable with my God-given immunity, in preference to RNA-altering, untested rush-job. All respect to any who disagree.
3 Comments
No point debating the net community benefits of public health policy with you, but it’s great to hear you have a way to move forwards again, even if it isn’t the way you originally planned…
Did I over-stretch the word ‘planned’??!! Oh yeah, planned is like intended, or imagined!
Just like immunity, vaccination and common sense are close enough to the same thing, right?
At a Christmas dinner recently, I heard someone say Trump would have prevented the Russian invasion of Ukraine by cutting a deal – two states to Russia and two states stay with Ukraine. Simples!
Wow, if the wisdom keeps flowing at this rate, we will have solved climate change by tomorrow, the WHO will have finished all its work by the day after, and the UN will be looking for new SDGs by Thursday. People might even resort to reading the Bible to search for explanations of all those miracles.
Ah-hhmmm…
Sometimes humour (ok, with a trace of sarcasm) is the only way to keep perspective between the complexity of impossibly large questions while making progress on the small steps in life.
I celebrate the small steps with you, and look forward to the next chapter unfolding, with a sprinkle of wisdom for flavour.
‘Net community public health policy’ has given us many new things, two of the most startling being ‘Sudden Adult Death’ Syndrome and myocarditis in otherwise fit healthy young people. We’d scarcely heard of these 3 years ago.
Mark I espectfully suggest you park the words ‘misinformation’ and ‘conspiracy theory’ (which to be fair you haven’t explicitly used), do the research and crunch the numbers with an open mind. The dots will join themselves.
Good for you Daniel.
Always good to espouse the truth and hopefully awaken those blind to the crazy world we are in. When doctors are threatened in Australia with deregistration, fines, and jail time by unelected non-medical bureaucrats for giving their medical opinions that do not conform to government talking points, you know there is a big problem.
When safe and effective drugs for treating viruses of all sorts are suddenly banned because they are cheap and out of patent protection and so worthless to big pharma companies, there is a big problem. When doctors are sacked for refusing a jab that is neither safe nor effective and people still don’t get it, you know that Stockholm Syndrome has set in.
As I’ve said do many times before, stick to your convictions Daniel! Well done.