September 18th: We had a real lazy morning, after our big day yesterday and all our muscles and bones were a bit sore after the climb. The downside to living on a boat is that we do not exercise as much as we do normally. We stayed in bed until 9:00am, shock – horror that’s terrible, but I did update the blog and sorted all the photos so it was sort of productive time. Gert & Mies from the Yacht “Kiwi Blue” arrived in the anchorage and called over so we sat and had a coffee and told them about our 4 hour guided walk on Komodo Island and they told us about the lovely anchorage just around the corner near Pink Beach. They did tell us they got harassed a lot from the local hawkers and had 3 boats hanging off them. They are persistent and they come up to the boat as we are anchoring which is really annoying. Here they are trying to flog pearls, which they all seem to have lots of, and carvings of Komodo Dragons. I don’t like pearls (apart from the very old pearl ear-rings Mum gave me that are very precious to me) and we brought 4 Komodo Dragons from the hawkers at the National Park so we don’t need anything but they are so persistent. You say no thank you etc. but they still just sit there. Most times they have a child with them and they use the child to try and persuade you to buy their wares. We usually just give the child a gift either a pen, sweets or hair ties if it’s a girl. We lifted the anchor after lunch and moved to the anchorage opposite Pink Beach. It is beautiful, very protected and we are anchored quite close to the reef, the water is a lovely teal blue colour and there’s lots of fish jumping. Pink Beach is about 400 metres across the channel and there are a lot of local dive boats and tourist boats moored there. There’s only 2 moorings so they are all rafted up to each other, it looks like a very popular snorkel site. We decided to go for a snorkel and Elizabeth came with us. We attempted to land the duck on the beach but it was really steep to and the waves were breaking so we decided to hang off the back of one of the tourist boats – BIG MISTAKE! Tourist boat probably gives you the wrong impression. These boats are Indonesian, locally made timber boats that look like something from the early 19th Century. As we tied up to him a couple of locals were washing dishes on the stern of the boat. They were friendly and very happy for us to tie up to them. We all jumped in the water and had a great snorkel, the water is very clear and there are lots and lots of beautiful colourful coral fish, the reef is lovely and we were thrilled – UNTIL – I had just got back in the duck and saw something floating past in the water…shit (literally) these boats do not have holding tanks! Oh God it was disgusting and we were nearly vomiting. Talk about ruin a good day. Can’t understand why these people don’t look after their beautiful resources, again the litter on Pink Beach although not as bad as some of the others is not good. We headed back to the boats and ended up having another game of 500 with Peter & Heidi, Peter is really enjoying the cards now, Heidi perhaps not as much but it’s still a lot of fun. We have really missed our games of 500 so it will be cool if we can convert them!
