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Leaving Tual

Well, this is going to be a brief update, but I don't even know where to start.

We arrived in Tual on Christmas afternoon, and I wasn't really expecting anything to happen, but it was nice to be anchored. We were told we would be cleared in the next day. We spent all day waiting for the Quarantine guy to come "in a few hours," "shortly," "he will be there in a while," "he just has to finish something," "after he's had his lunch." He finally arrived on the 27th at 11 am, and I wasn't very happy. I am at a complete loss as to how to explain the level of complete frustration and almost overwhelming perplexity of what happened when he got to the boat. He sat in the cockpit watching videos on Facebook. I wish I could say I was exaggerating, but I looked over his shoulder. Has our addiction to cell phones become so great we are completely oblivious of our surroundings and think it's acceptable to behave like this? It's pretty obvious what he was doing the day before. He spent less time looking at any biosecurity threats on board than looking at Facebook while he was on the boat.

Then we had to drive to immigration and get a stamp (which only took a few hours) and go back to the boat and wait for customs, who didn't come because they were at the mosque. So we didn't get cleared in until the afternoon of the 27th. We had a fair bit of cleaning to do and also did some more repairs to the genset. Our crew decided to leave, as the issues and delays—absolutely not surprisingly—proved to be a bit demoralizing.

We tried to get fuel the following day, but buying fuel in Indonesia isn't simple, and the mission was canceled as the owner of the gas station was there and wouldn't allow us to get any. We received a text later to say he had left and quickly set off again to fill up some of our drums. As you can probably tell, I wasn't in the best of humors by now.

The other thing of note is the amount of garbage in the water. I don't know how to adequately explain the sheer volume of garbage floating around. The anchorage was literally covered in floating plastic, bottles, drums, and under the surface were plastic bags, rice sacks, flour sacks, and all sorts of junk like logs, plywood, and anything else that would float. We motored out of the anchorage this morning (which is about 5nm to sea), and we went through garbage the entire way. It's incomprehensible to me that such a small town can have so much trash and garbage. I have never in my life seen so much garbage floating on the water.

To add to my already rising levels of annoyance, the people on the boat next door on one side had their dinghy stolen on the 3rd night, we were there and the people on the other side had 2 kids with dengue. We also were visited by some possibly drunk but fairly aggressive locals who didn't receive a very warm welcome from me. I suspect they were going to ask for something to drink or fuel and they were obviously pretty poor judges of my generosity. So we were surrounded by garbage and thieves in a health hotspot – it's great to be moving towards Sorong, and we have already been looking at flights! The only thing on my mind now is that Sorong is one of my least favourite places - I know several people who have been robbed there.

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