Saturday 24 January – we arrive in Wangi Wangi capital of Wakatobi

We managed another successful night of slowly sailing with the jib. It was a great relief to not have hit anything, at first light it was obvious we were surrounded by FADS. We were about 5 miles out of Wangi Wangi by 6:30am, the jib had pushed us faster than expected. I sat up front the rest of the way looking out for FADS and fishing boats, loads of long boats were out too. We finally made it in through the harbour markers and were so impressed to find this brand new marina. Rowan had contacted the Harbour Master Mr Albar who said we could go straight in. We were excited to see one other yacht, but sadly it is a Chinese couple who don’t speak English. I was disappointed they didn’t come to help catch our ropes, so we had to do it all ourselves. Luckily the water was flat calm and Rowan aced getting into our berth which landed up being easy to tie onto without any help. Mr Albar arrived shortly afterwards who was incredibly helpful and spoke great English which is such a help. We managed to organise renting a scooter from him tomorrow, a snorkel trip the next day and he and his son will clean PolePole’s fluffy green bottom tomorrow. It was a wonderful feeling to be safely tied up and just a step onto land in such an impressive marina. The marina has been abandoned already so no charge and no facilities, ie no water or electricity. It has the smartest club house and a big conference area nearby. So weird all this infrastructure has been abandoned, it has exceeded our expectations, the water is lovely and clear which is surprising for a city harbour. It was blisteringly hot and as we have not had much sleep the last couple of nights, we got the awning up and relaxed during the heat of the day. Rowan thinks the Chinese boat was the one that had a lot of social media coverage because it was boarded in PNG and raided by the authorities, they turned the interior upside down. Sadly we can’t ask them for the story, nor do I really want to know as the whole story seemed odd, no other yacht had that treatment!

Late afternoon we went for a walk into town. At the end of the pontoon they were setting up food stalls and children’s inflatable bouncy castles, all very busy, a real buzz with young people promenading with their kids. At the main road is the market which opens at 4pm to 8pm, which is so sensible. Great looking fruit and veg but we will only restock when we leave, we plan to eat out every evening, the food is so cheap. We had a very jolly walk through town, everyone greeting us effusively, we were definitely a novelty, they certainly don’t seem to get a lot of foreign tourists here, we certainly did not see any. We went to a restaurant with great reviews on the NFL App, it had a great location on the waterfront. We got there at about 6:15pm, they were open but not another soul in the restaurant. We can’t work out if it is seriously out of season, we were the only customers all night. A very sweet young girl served us who giggled at everything, especially when we ordered 3 Bintangs (beer), it wasn’t too surprising as about 20 minutes later she turned up with 3 enormous bottles. We think she must have gone down the road to get them. We decided to be adventurous with our food ordering, as translating was pretty hit and miss. It was all delicious with with a great aubergine dish, what appeared to be an Indonesian frittata, tempeh fried shrimps with a sauce that made them really delicious, a veggie soup which wasn’t that great, but all in all a great treat. The chicken noodle dish we ordered for some reason as they served us they said was unavailable, but we were stuffed with what we had. It was lovely sitting on the water’s edge admiring all the boats around us which looked totally unseaworthy but were obviously still fully functioning. We had a good walk back in the dark, and like Rowan said, never once felt unsafe. A very, very friendly place much more so than Raja Ampat we think, more like the islands we came through. There are loads of Mosques here and the competing calls to prayer is deafening even if very atmospheric, some have amazing voices, others seem to forget they are on loudspeaker and chortle away at the end. Very different. The harbour is very busy with big ferries going in and out. There is definitely a much bigger population around these outer islands of Sulawesi, the big island nearby. We’ve also discovered we are in a new time zone, so the evenings are not quite so light as we thought. We flopped into bed exhausted, most probably the longest walk we have had since Vanuatu!