Kupang to Ende
March 6th
On the monday morning i woke up pretty well hungover, but more dehydrated than anything. It had been a good night in the Karang Mas the night before, and we got through lots of bottles of Anker beer. Today was the day we were leaving Kupang for Flores.
Abdul told us that yesterday's ferry to east Flores had gone round in circles three times and then returned to Bolok because it was too rough to make the crossing. Shit! Just what we needed! Of course this didn't mean our ferry wouldn't be going that day, but the chances of us getting out of Timor did seem a bit lower...
Anyway, we got our stuff together, bought a bit of food and three bottles of water and caught a very crowded and mechanically dodgy bemo to Bolok.
The place was a bit more lively that day! I had to endure the usual shoving match for tickets before we walked down the concrete pier to where two ferries were tied up. They were old rustbuckets that looked like they'd already sunk a couple of times, but pretty much what i would have expected. The second one was the one that didn't get to Flores the day before - and it didn't look like it was planning to go that day either.
On the bottom deck of the ferry there was a drive-on cargo area, being loaded up with stacks of this and that in an apparently haphazard way. It obviously wasn't so haphazard though, or we wouldn't have had a chance of getting anywhere. The passenger area was up some iron stairs to the top deck.
Second class had rows of those uncomfortable orange plastic chairs you find in airports and railway stations. I'd managed to sleep sitting on seats like that once, during a fifteen hour stint in Bangkok's Don Muang airport on the way from London to Sydney, but i doubted i could manage it again! It wasn't really full when we got on board, but then it was only one o'clock and we weren't due to leave till two. A lot of people had captured themselves a stretch of deck space and spread out sleeping mats. The deck was covered, with open sides and green plastic tarpaulins which rolled down to keep the weather out if necessary. All in all, it could have been better, it could have been worse, but i wasn't banking on getting much sleep that night. With luck though, we should have arrived at Ende the next morning.
The scene at the dock was of one of frantic activity. On the cargo deck, yellow-shirted dockers were unloading packages from a truck parked on board. Most of the central part of the cargo deck was taken up with five foot high stacks of large, mainly white-wrapped packages. Every stack was covered with people, lying, sitting, sleeping, talking and eating. A few were lying, sitting or standing on the deck itself. Half a dozen youngish men were fishing off the stern and catching the small silver fish which were swimming around the boat in massive shoals.
The seating deck gradually began to fill up and it started to feel like it must be about time to leave. But the hawkers were still walking around, selling food and drinks from wooden trays, so it was obvious we weren't going to leave for a while.
The ferry eventually left at twenty past seven. At first it was fairly comfortable, but after a while the nightmare began... I could tell straight away that the boat definitely wasn't designed for rough weather. It was the same type as the one that turned back the day before - but this one wasn't turning back.Having a front cargo door (as well as a back one, for some weird reason), it vessel wasn't very well suited to punching through the waves and it had to go up one side of every wave and down the other side. Also, due to its obviously high centre of gravity, it had no chance of surviving any reasonable sized waves from anything other than straight ahead.
There was a swell of about three metres at the most and taken from head on, the waves made the boat pitch hideously. But even at ten or fifteen degrees off head-on, it rolled in a really scary way. I'd spent quite a lot of time on a fair few different boats, ever since i was born, but i'd never been as scared as i was that night. I could feel straight away that it was hideously unstable and not suitable for any conditions other than almost dead-calm. It reminded me a lot of the car ferries that cross the Thames at Woolwich...
Anyway, at least partly because of the design of the boat, it could make very little headway. It ended up taking twenty four hours on what should have been a fourteen hour trip. It was making maybe four knots through the water, but up against the wind and waves this often resulted in almost no headway at all, relative to the land. From the time Flores came in sight to when we were actually docked seemed to take forever - like maybe ten hours. And most of this time we didn't seem to be moving at all!
The highlight of the voyage came in the middle of the night. There were tarps which rolled down for closing in the sides of the economy seating area to keep the weather out. Of course, these were generally flapping around noisily in the wind. Everyone woke up to a massive sheet of rain flying horizontally in from the port side. I grabbed my bedding and dashed for cover and then went to help a couple of other people tie down the tarps. This was a massive struggle - wrestling with a tarp in a strong wind is always difficult. And with the rain pouring in we got good and soaked! After that, the deck was too wet to lie down on again.
When we finally arrived at Ende, it was a bit of a laugh too! We went down to the cargo deck where the door was and everyone seemed to have gone mad. A lot of people were running around shouting and everybody else was clustered in the middle of both sides, where they were struggling to be first into one of the half dozen small boats hanging on there.
Several people tried to get us to go with them to the shore for a thousand rupiah or something. But, not too sure what was going on, we just hung around and watched for a while.
It became obvious we were going to have to get a sampan (as the small boats were called) if we wanted to go ashore. They scull them, with one paddle out the back, just like we do around the Thames estuary. I was surprised to see that, as i'd never seen it done anywhere else.
On the beach, which was only a few minutes away, it was more of the same chaotic madness. It was very dark and there were heaps of people lined up along the water line, some waiting to get onto the ferry, some coming off and others trying to get something out of either set of passengers. We eventually picked a route through the shadowy crowd and found our way off the beach to where the bemo drivers were hassling people. We got in one of the waiting bemos and got seriously ripped off for a short trip to Ikhlas homestay, which had been recommended to us by Martin, the man who had accompanied us from Kupang airport. In the bemo with us there were a couple of pommie geezers and a swiss woman who we'd met on the boat.