WEDNESDAY 14TH – STILL IN DARWIN!!

Well, are we having an adventure, albeit not the one we were expecting?

As we were preparing to put the car and van into storage and to head to the airport yesterday morning, we received a call to say that there was some technical difficulty with the plane which was supposed to be taking us to Biak to meet the ship and that the flight had been postponed for an unknown period. The person who rang kindly offered to pay for another night in the caravan park.

We said that wasn't going to work because we had run our supplies down, turned off the fridge and weren't proposing to do any more shopping until after the cruise. They therefore agreed to put us up in a very nice air conditioned hotel and we proceeded to put the van into storage but kept the car.

We then had a pleasant day with Mark, Ceris and their daughter Gillian seeing more Darwin sights including the Darwin and Defence Museums.

At about 3:00 pm, we received a call to advise that the flight had been rescheduled and that we needed to be at the airport at 3:30 am for a 5:00 am departure. That created a complexity with the car in that the storage facility would not be open at 3:00 am to enable us to leave it there so it was decided that we would leave it in the long term car park at the airport.

At 11:30 last night, we were woken from a deep sleep by my phone making a noise. I thought it was the alarm going off and couldn't work out why it went off at precisely 11:30 given that I had set it for 2:30. I eventually worked out that it wasn't the alarm at all but actually a phone call which, of course, I missed.

A message followed to say that there was a problem with visas and the plane would not now be leaving at 5:00am

What fun. We now await further advice as to when we go.

In the meantime, it is 1:30am. I am wide awake so I thought I would update the blog.

Watch this space for further exciting developments. One can only speculate what would have happened if there had not been a problem with the plane yesterday morning and we had arrived in Biak to find that there was a visa problem.

I suspect that there are some very red faces at Coral Expeditions, as they now call themselves and it would appear that we will be having a somewhat shortened cruise.