Monday 20 October – enjoying this enormous bay to ourselves

We had a lot of fisherman with their bright orange lights gliding silently around the river and getting quite close to the boat last night, I found it a little unnerving in the pitch dark, but it turned out to be fine and a very peaceful night. We got a few chores done and then decided to head into the village, Nathan the guy in the boat yesterday was sending Rowan messages every half hour, which were really beginning to annoy Rowan. It was a very smart Christian village, most of the houses on the water front, with endless boats tied up to the many jetties along the water front. We had got so used to the Islands we have been travelling through all speaking reasonable English, it is rather a shock to find that we can’t communicate very well now at all, most here seem to have no English at all. We had a good walk the length of the village and bumped into Nathan half way. We confirmed we would like to go on a river tour with him tomorrow at 10am which he was dead chuffed about.

We got back into JeldiJeldi and decided to go and explore towards the big expanse of water, which I will call a lake from here on, that the river runs into. I am not sure if you can call this a river it is more like a big inland bay. We came to a point where we could take a little side river or go straight to the big lake, it looked like it might rain, so we took the left fork as we thought the lake would get choppy. It was a lovely cruise along the river, passing a Muslim village with a mosque, so different to the other village. It felt like it was getting more remote, and certainly we did not see a single boat, the other fork has quite a bit of boat traffic on it as there are 8 villages on the big lake. We went as far as we could to see the entrance to the lake and then turned around as the sky got darker. We came around the corner and saw Pole Pole just as the rain arrived, it was pretty good timing.

It was another relaxing evening listening to all the bird calls.