« Off to Darwin with 100 koala bears | Main | A mountain to climb »
April 6, 2005
Steve Returns!
Stevie's blog: arrived into Darwin in the ungodly hours of this morning after a 30 hour journey from Devon, England, jumped off the plane and straight into the murky deep-end of Expedition 360.It's amazing how quickly even the most bizarre circumstances become normality, because I already feel quite at home here, hustling on a shoestring in the tropics. Jason greeted me at the airport (it's been almost six years since I last saw him and Moksha vanish into the blue horizon, watching from an escort vessel 200 miles off the coast of Hawaii) on a $10 bike fresh the pawn shop and we made our way back to a local hostelry for a good catch-up and to plan strategy for this next leg - pedalling Moksha 600 miles to Timor, Indonesia. For my part, strategy is too grand a term for the immediate needs of transportation (I trumped Jason with a deluxe $30 bike this pm) and footwear - a disintegrating pair of sandals fished from a stinking pile of expo360 gear that (thanks to some local dingoes, winos, or vandals,hard to tell which) we found scattered along the dirt floor of a disused warehouse near the wharf. Moksha is also there, under an upsettingly thick layer of dust and cobwebs, looking like a relic unearthed in 3030 AD, a thousand years after the Apocalypse.
We now have about 3 weeks to restore her to her former,ocean-going dignity, resupply and pedal onward to the next continent - Asia. The enormity of the challenge is slowly filtering into my jetlagged brain. As of now we are homeless (again!), relying (again!!) on the goodwill of local people to make it happen, but I'm left with the familiar, intoxicating thrill of knowing that it WILL, in its own surprising way, all come together in the end. It's good to be back.
Stevie.
Posted on April 6, 2005 11:38 PM