Posted: 24th October 2011.
Hi everyone,
Just a quick update, and I promise this time I will be brief! Apparently I have a tendency to ramble???
After a successful crossing into Indonesian waters with several fly-overs from Coastwatch keeping an eye on us (and scaring the crap out of us with their low flying) we made it to Kupang on the 19th ..exactly as planned and without using to much fuel with one day of full sailing and no motors (glorious).
Spent 3 days in Kupang doing a lot of waiting around..Napa our agent went and handed our passports over to immigration and then we waited for him to return them…then he went and got our fuel and we waited for him to return and basically that is the way most of our time went in Kupang…waiting.
The people of Kupang/Timor were really friendly and helpful. Ate a couple of times at the night markets managing to survive without any cases of Bali belly. Never saw one official, things went smoothly and we were out of there after 3 days. Not many westerners in Timor and apart from a large catamaran full of Estonians (4 berths/8 men) and a small 
wooden monohull owned by an Aussie living in Bali we were the only boat in Kupang (well apart from the hundreds of Indo fishing boats).
Left Kupang early Saturday morning and motor sailed 60 – 70 miles across to the south end of Rote with our backpacking, surfing, law student from Canada called Kyle.
Rote is a beautiful island with palm trees and white sandy beaches…we anchored off Nembrula which is a bit of a surfing mecca for a lot of Aussies and the best thing about it was …WE CAN SWIM IN THE WATER!!!! We had our first 
swim since June in Broome and boy was it nice! Scrubbed a bit of the hull down as it was very gungy and green after our trip through the Kimberlies.
Today we hired a scooter and did a short half day sightseeing trip around the coast of Rote and barely missed being knocked off by a falling coconut but apart from that no dramas..the traffic here is very quiet in comparison to that of Bali though the roads are a little to be desired (typical Indo) and after half a day I don’t think our bums could have handled much more! It cost us about 15 dollars for motorbike hire for a day, 1 litre of petrol, a gado gado and nasi goreng for lunch, two drinks at a roadside shop, two large bintangs and a large 
bottle of water…NOT BAD!
Tomorrow we head off to the weekly markets in the morning to see if we can pick up some more fruit and veg and then we head back to Kupang to drop of our travelling companion and then we’ll head over to Alor to see if we can get in some diving ..YAY!
So anyhoo folks thats about all for now (don’t want to bore you with too much detail) and we’ll write again soon XXXX
Cam and Nikki
SV Dreamer