The end of that excursion

The Berlin Nakroma arrives - I see a rainbow (Home)

The crazy queue to load up and launch

A young boy waits in front of cloud clad mountains for potter work

Guido, our AP fixer looking very upset and tired. I feel the way he looks too.

Everything goes along

My most expensive 2-meters travelled

Corridor residents

So did I ever mentioned that we were bumbed off our U.N. flight from Oe-cusse enclave back to Dili?

My gawd. We were ready to leave the island which only has electricity for about 10hrs starting from 7pm and automatically switches itself off. The place is so untouched that we hardly found any available places to live in.

The rooms which we stayed in were simply furnished with beds and a toilet with some running water and a huge pail.

Which is a luxury compared to some of the places i've slept in - which includes the floors of an outdoor restaurant.

Nice for adventure and I was all for it but by this time I was tired and have been having a pretty long year at work fresh out of Thailand.

Believe you me, i'm totally for roughing things out and working in extreme conditions but by the last day, when you are mentally prepared to go home, there's no looking back.

So, we got the the air field and found out that we were bumped onto the waiting list of passenger departures because a whole group of U.N. police had to leave Oe-cusse for some meeting but I strongly believe they just wanted to get off Oe-cusse and back to Dili where the women are. A 1hr flight out otherwise there is no real decent means for getting off the island quickly.

Then we started to get desperate because we had all our gear and no more place to live. We remembered that we had a number of an Australian pilot who had chartered flights out.

Then we got the go-ahead to leave on that flight. Yes we chartered that flight out. An hour and a half after a few phone calls, we heard propellers arriving but only to get bad news that the flight which we chartered had to medi-vac some people from the hospital.

Standing there with all my luggage and camera gear with everyone else, all ready to leave and almost boarding the plane, but being rejected again left me feeling miserable.

So. The only other way out was by a 15hr ferry ride.

I had no idea what to expect.

So 4 hours later, the mother ship arrived.

I saw a group of a couple of hundred people standing by the jetty, with motorcycles, spare bike parts, cars, goats, chickens, pigs, vegetables and dogs.

IT was like NOAH's ARK.

At this point, my eyes lit up.

If we're gonna be going home the adventurous way, might as well do it all the way.

The Berlin Nakroma provides a ferry service from Oe-cusse to Dili 2x a week at USD$14 a pop.

I paid an extra $USD2 for a 2-meter boat crossing - probably the most expensive 2-meters I will ever travel in my life but I really didn't want to get wet in waist deep water.

It takes people, animals and vehicles but those without seats will sleep on the deck.

We were lucky to buy over officer's bunks because of our equipment. But when I stepped out of the door form our "rooms" I realised I was just a step away from stepping on a mother and her young baby sleeping right outside. Breasts exposed because they both had fallen asleep from the nursing.

I didn't sleep much in the end. I was enjoying the ride, the wind the sunset and the sounds of people chattering, and babies crying and the occasional goat/chicken/duck quack from below deck.

Much better than the helicopters I say. It pretty much completed my enclave adventure but i'm glad that our ship didn't get grounded for another 6 hrs from corals beneath the sea.

Will gladly do this again, but not right now. (: