Sunday 8 July 2012

BELITUNG BELITUNG!! July 2012



7th July
We had a big day on Thursday starting at the beach at 7 am First we went into Haruns office to drop papers for one of his staff to take to the officials to arrange for our clearance from Indonesia, Next we visited two traditional markets for couple of hours of vegetable and fruit shopping. It was great fun as everyone wants photos taken and to have a chat. I got my woven plastic basket for 15000 rup so smiling! I had seen one in the tourist shop but they were only for use within the store and wouldn't sell to me.
Wempi our driver with a local bike carrier called Ambong

After the market we went back to Haruns office to pick him up to take him to lunch.  Great food again at a Chinese style restaurant.Then it was off for more shopping for oil, beer, filters, relays, and other boat stuff! Haruns Hardware store has most of the things we needed and many more beside. We got the sail back all repaired for $15 so we will be able to put that one back on for a while longer.



Local boats builders on the beach.



On the way back to Taipan we stopped at a little boat building yard by the bridge for big chat an photos of course. There were a  group of children who were very shy for all of 2 minutes, then wanted endless photos taken and lots of laughs. Just lovely. It takes one man a month to build one of these boats. They cost about A$2500


We bought a fabulous Lino Cut from this talented artist  Check out his Blog http://mansyurmasud.blogspot.com/

We met Mansyur Masud a local artist there, and were able to purchase a lovely lino cut print of the bicycle Ambong basket, a very traditional Belitung item. He  is a really nice guy and great English. Explained that he exhibits in Jakarta an works here about half of the time. Most works go international. It turns out that he was born in Macassar, where we visited in 2006.
 Check out his web site.
Mansyur Masud 

He had a fabulous work on display at the Expo as seen in the photo. Anyway suffice to say it was a  big  day and we were in bed by 8.00
We got visa till Sunday even though  we were checked out on Firday, they stamped Sunday our last date so that's good
We loaded the CMap charts Plan2 Nav in IPad for the rest of the run because Haruns charts look much better for 1000 1slands. I hope they're  right!
 
Sunday 8th July
Beautiful day again. Harun came to dinner last night and we said our thanks and farewell. Harun is a Belitung treasure and will not be forgotten! Thanks Harun!!
Monday. Some internet jobs have come up and require attention. So internet and snorkeling again. Today fabulous as ever, even in the less than average light , as we have quite heavy cloud, we saw nemo fish we had never seen before and a number of new corals.