The Best-Laid Plans

When we arrived back here in January, the plan was to stay until June and then return to Australia for a couple of months to avoid the rainy, windy months of June and July in Raja Ampat.  Most of our major projects on the island are now finished, so finally we’ve been able to enjoy more of what we love – diving and taking photos.  

Of course, there’s been the usual maintenance issues to deal with – a faulty connector on our solar panels that took a bit of troubleshooting to identify and several administration headaches, such as getting our retirement visa extended. It should have been a simple online process.  We asked a new agent in Sorong to do it for us, but somehow the wrong application was put in and of course once you’ve paid there’s no way to get a refund or credit from the local immigration department, so our new visa extension cost more than double what it should have done. That’s Indonesian bureaucracy and efficiency for you.  At least we now have 12 months before having to deal with them again…

The weather has been very changeable in the last couple of months.  Not many clear skies, lots of brief squalls and overcast days, and some occasionally very large swells that have deposited mountains of plastic garbage on our beaches.  It’s heartbreaking, and makes us a little despondent that SE Asia will ever do something about reducing plastic waste.  

Even the tourists that come to Raja Ampat are now complaining about the amount of plastic in the water and on the beaches, so it will affect the tourism industry here for sure.  The problem as we see it is a combination of lack of education about waste disposal (we see many locals just throw their plastic wrappers and bottles in the ocean), a lack of government initiatives to reduce plastic use, and a lack of recycling plants or water filtration systems (meaning many island populations are reliant on bottled water for drinking).  I’m also sure that much of the ocean pollution we get here comes from far afield – even probably the Philippines – as our worst garbage days are when the wind and swells are from the northwest quadrant. 

As I mentioned in our last blog, the big swells have also caused more erosion on our front beach – so much so that our lounge/dining room is in danger of becoming an over-the-water building at high tide!  We’re experimenting with building a wooden retaining wall  and if it’s successful we’ll extend it further along the beachfront.  For now, we’ll just have to wait and see…

Other improvements include two new roofs on the guest houses, so now all the roofs bar the kitchen/workshop have been replaced.  Based on our experience, it seems the life expectancy is about 3 years so we probably have one more year before the kitchen roof will need re-doing as this is the newest building that was rebuilt after the fire.  The buildings themselves are standing up to the elements pretty well, so hopefully there’s a few more years before the walls will need re-doing.  But it’s certainly a lot less expensive than renovating a home in Sydney, I can tell you!

My veggie garden is a bit sparse because we haven’t been here consistently enough to keep it going, but we had a great crop of Birdseye chillies and hydroponic mint and basil last year, and I’ve just harvested my first hydroponic capsicum. It was a wee bit small, but it tasted delicious!

Sadly, we discovered recently that our best-laid plans to stay until June have to be changed. Another skin cancer has appeared on Bruce’s foot, most likely a Squamous Cell Carcinoma, and the advice from his specialist is to remove it within 6 weeks.  As there’s no reliable skin cancer specialists here, it means another trip back to Australia to have it dealt with…. I’m feeling inclined to just stop making plans, it’s got to be easier!

So now we’re in the throes of packing everything away and getting ourselves ready to head to Cairns in April.  It’s not all bad news as we get to see the family and our gorgeous little grandaughter Millie, but I’m hoping the Powers that Be are kind enough to give us a bit longer in our island paradise after we come back this time.  For now, we’ll just make the most of all the gorgeous diving and sunsets…