Saturday 15 November – dinghy visit to all the sites

Today we explored the whole area by dinghy so we could photograph the various walls with rock art and enter some of the caves we could not get into in the kayak. When we visited the first rock art wall, we had the pontoon to ourselves and admired the red ochre drawings. It reminded me so much of a holiday a few years ago in South Africa where we walked around for a few days with a guide who showed us the most incredible rock art. Just as we were finishing up a very fancy tender turned up with a whole lot of American tourists in life jackets, they did not disembark onto the pontoon, but we were able to listen to their guide. The theory is it was Aboriginal people migrating to Australia who did the paintings about 40 thousand years ago, the reason being there is no red ochre in this area. The guide was quite interesting, I asked them what boat they were on, the guests in chorus shouted they were from ‘The World’, I said oh a cruise liner and was shouted down, this is their home! It is a residential liner, each of the 165 cabins is privately owned, definitely for the elderly. Later on while we were meandering around the karst islands we spotted the liner way out at sea. Impressive that they get to such out of the way places like this. We visited the other rock art site, dolphins and tuna seem to be common drawings and plenty of hand stencils. The hand stencils are always higher up, they think it may signify a more spiritual meaning, compared to the drawings lower down.

While we were having tea back at PolePole in the afternoon, during a little rain shower.The World tender arrived in our anchorage, they went to look at the cliffs near us, they were just too far away to hear what they were saying. When it had cooled down a bit we went back out exploring, we went up to the cliff near us where the tender was and found there were more rock art stencils and drawings, right next to us. We explored the area near the homestay where we had supper, the rock formations were astonishing, just everywhere you looked was another incredibly carved out island. We started seeing things in the formations, many dinosaurs, rhino heads, but the best was Coco our old dog! Back to PolePole for a chicken Indonesian curry, I added some frozen pumpkin and and peas to get some veg into us. We have plenty of chillies, garlic, ginger, turmeric, lemon grass and Kaffir Lime leaves, so no problem making a curry, our freezer has a reasonable amount of meat left, just fresh veg and fruit we are out of. Rowan has managed to get a Homestay to order us some supplies from Sorong, so we should be picking up eggs and some fruit and veg on Wednesday morning. We will move to the Homestay tomorrow.