I’ll admit it is a head spin. One moment it feels like weeks until any possible progress towards Indonesia. The next it is imminent. This morning took a few leaps and bounds in that direction.
A little email exchange with the shipping line last night confirmed a 9am appointment to process paperwork for the bike. I turned up right on time, but the gentleman who had said yes to 9am wasn’t there until 9:30am. No worries. An hour or so here or there is nothing on the scale of the months it has taken for this unwashed (i mean “unvaccinated”) biker to get to this point. When he arrived, it took another hour of messing around doing I’m not quite sure what – all seemingly related to my bike. It was then announced with fanfare that he was ready to duck down to Customs to get a stamp on my bike’s “Carnet” or “CPD” (same for the bike as a Passport for a person). I was to wait the half hour for his return. An hour later, he was back, and my paperwork was magically complete.
I am not sure, but suspect that my emailing last week resulted in a sense of possible reputational damage for the Aussie team (“freight forwarder”) who put my bike in a container on the boat. So I think they in turn lent on the Dili team to expedite my bike’s release. Because I’m now prepared to believe that I will in fact be collecting my bike tomorrow morning – making 5 calendar days from the boats arrival, a lot better than the “3+ weeks” of some estimates.
That left me with possibly enough time to weave across town like a shuttle through a loom to the Immigration Dept. Now that my bike retrieval is a genuine prospect, I need to rescue my Passport from the visa extension process. The extension will still save me a $150 fine (nobody wants that), but I scraped in to ask if my visa and Passport are ready. “It’ll be ready in a week” they replied. To which I said “that’s a problem, because I need to leave Timor now.” A bit of kerfuffle and two other officials later, “a week” turned into “come back tomorrow [Tuesday] at 2pm”.
So I am now expecting to have my Timor paperwork sorted and my bike retrieved tomorrow.
That leaves the question of Indonesia Immigration, which now suddenly has become critical path and urgent. I dropped in this afternoon to explore. The first three times I put the question, the answer was “you can’t come to Indonesia unless you’re vaccinated twice”. Very stern. Show of palms. I then asked to speak to a supervisor, and I believe I might have a way forward. Certainly there’s relatively little cost in riding to the border to find out, and a significant impact in not getting the bike and me out of Timor. But I’ll stay mum on details until that bridge is well and truly crossed.
As of tomorrow, I may well be cleaning, checking, packing the bike and preparing to get on the road. Leaving Darwin (and Aus) was a major milestone in the road trip, but – if I can cross this border – I will for the first time really have a sense that the round-the-world journey is under way.
Scrap that. Just after I wrote that and before I posted this diary entry, I had an email to say the container wasn’t delivered today and so the bike will be delayed a day. Wednesday? Sigh. Silly me for believing what I was told.
Soon.
Still – regardless, the outlook has shifted seismically just today. I’m now quite excited at being back on a bike – my bike – and getting back on the road – the road heading to London.
ADDENDUM after the fact:
Although the many promises and delays left me still cautious, there was indeed a reunion the next morning, with the bike and his boy belatedly back together.
2 Comments
Wow. Let’s pray for the “landing” of these moving parts
Good for you. I am glad you at almost travelling again.