We had a wonderful visit to Moon Rock Lagoon before leaving Indonesia. We hiked up to Moon Rock on the first non-hazy day in six weeks, according to Antje, the German proprietor of the resort Eco-symbiosis. The colors in the lagoon were stunning.
After a grueling hike (adults only) to the other side of the island and a relaxing afternoon, we met Antje on shore for a tour of her resort and a delicious dinner. Another boat, SV Patonga, with girls ages 5, 7, and 9 joined us for dinner.
I took Luz to the doctor in Tarempa, Indonesia because her right ear was hurting her so badly that she cried if you bumped it. The “doctor” turned out to be two enthusiastic young women in military fatigues. They laughed a lot as they tried to communicate in English with us. They told us they were military medical personnel. We were able to walk right in, and they gave us some antibiotics for her infected ear. It cost $8 USD for the consultation and the medicine.
Then we checked out of Indonesia, and began a 450 mile passage to Brunei Darussalam, a small country in northern Borneo surrounded by Malaysia. We wanted to avoid the poor air quality in Kuching and also keep our distance from the coast of Borneo because of the many floating logs.
When we went to pull up our anchor, we found it was well and truly stuck in 10 meters of water. Riki free dove to free the anchor, and we were off!
The first day of the passage I made 5 pizzas in my pizza factory.
We discovered a new hang-out area — the aft deck. We have special cushions for the aft deck, but we rarely use them. However, now that we have our new three-part shade awning, we discovered that we can put up the aft shade awning while underway motoring. One day I played chess against each of the kids, and we played Splendor a few times on the aft deck.
One morning Riki woke up to find me hand-steering. “What are you doing?” he asked.
I replied, “The autopilot won’t hold the course”. I had abandoned my hashbrowns project in the galley in order to steer.
“Let me get some coffee before I tear into it.”
The kids all took a turn hand-steering while Riki was fixing the autopilot, and I was finishing breakfast.
We made it to Brunei and proceeded to do some boat jobs — do laundry, and fill up with diesel and groceries. The diesel in Brunei is of good quality and very cheap due to its offshore oil industry — .40 cents a liter.
On Monday, October 12th, Jade came to my bed in the morning and said, “Mama, it’s the big day!” It was Sanne’s birthday, and Jade had been planning the day for weeks. Brigitte and Bruno joined us to celebrate Sanne with a small afternoon party on evi. Koen made his delicious birthday cake.
Then we all went into the capital of Brunei, Bandar Seri Begawan, for a river boat tour. We zoomed along in a narrow boat with an 80 HP motor in the river…until we spotted proboscis monkeys, and stopped to watch them.
It started to rain quite hard — we are in the rainy season now. We stopped our tour of the water village to eat dinner at Soto Pabo restaurant. We decided to order Ambuyat, Brunei’s national dish. Ambuyat is a sticky, translucent, and flavorless sago palm starch. You twirl it around wooden chopsticks called chandas and dip it into sauces. We were instructed not to chew it all, but just to swallow. Here is a video of brave Chef Koen being the first to try Ambuyat.
The owner of the restaurant wanted to take a photo with all of us in the restaurant, and he insisted on gifting us Brunei chicken and beef satay to takeaway. After dinner, we continued our tour (still raining) to see fireflies in the trees on the river banks. We figured the satay was best eaten hot, so found room in our already-full stomachs. It was so delicious! We finished our tour at 9 pm, and got back to the boats at 10 pm. What an epic day!
A few days later, we went in to the authorities to check out of Brunei, intending to leave early the next morning for a 60 mile sail to Pulau Tiga, in Malaysia. They told us that if we wanted to leave in the morning, we would have to come back in the morning to check out. So we looked at each other and said, we will leave tonight. They kept asking us what time we would leave…so we figured we had better actually leave. We hurried home, hustled to take the tarps down, and pulled the anchor up at 6 pm. Our impromptu overnight trip went smoothly, and we dropped anchor and had the tarps up again by 7 am.
In Pulau Tiga we had a really nice snorkel and some mellow days. Now we are in Kota Kinabalu at Sutera Harbour Marina, the fanciest marina I have ever stayed at. It is connected to three resorts, and has four or five swimming pools (including an Olympic lap pool), a bowling alley, four pickleball courts, a sauna, a jacuzzi, a movie theater, and daily free crafts activities at the Kiddies Club. This is a good base to do some land travel in Borneo. We will be here for about two weeks before we head to Puerto Princesa on the island of Palawan in the southern Philippines.
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