February 29, 2004
Wandering another Ocean Feb 29, 2004
It's easy to get sidetracked on a trip around the world. In Palau, where we just left, there are a few cruisers who've done just that, in a big way. They are permanently stopped in Palau, their boats anchored in a quiet cove, they have jobs, some of them, others just chill out, and doubtless they'll never leave. Palau was just a stop when they arrived; somehow it changed to a home. Whatever reasons they had for setting off on a world cruise some time in the past, they're forgotten now, replaced by an inertia, which, like a trap, is easy to fall into. One day you are cruisers, the next you're part of the local scene.
We stayed in the South Pacific for over five years. The South Pacific is a big place, from Tonga and Fiji to Australia, the Solomons, and PNG; but still, it's all part of the same neighborhood. If you sail around those countries for a while you keep running into the same people, other cruisers like you, stuck in the South Pacific loop.
We've broken out of that loop now, I guess. Wandering slowly, almost aimlessly it seems, across another ocean, we're finally, and truly, out of the South Pacific. Just ahead, barely over the horizon, is Asia. The immensity of this fact is slow to sink in. But we've finally moved on. Maybe we will make it around the world after all. At least we got past the South Pacific.
We really haven't been tempted to stop yet. I guess we still have this itch to keep moving. We're never quite satisfied with any place we visit, never ready to stay there for good, and never quite knowing why, or just what we're looking for. This wandering itself has become the lifestyle now, its sort of, just…"what we do". Why, I don't know. It's not that we expect to come over the horizon some day and sight some paradise to make it all worthwhile even. Sometimes it seems like we just don't have any choice anymore. Maybe we just have to ramble.
So we find ourselves on another walk-about, on another faceless expanse of ocean, all blue and ceaselessly moving on itself, and looking like it is endless as we plod along. You feel pretty small and alone out here, and one ocean looks pretty much like another, but if you just keep plodding, you get somewhere, usually somewhere new, can't hardly help it. When you set off on the ocean, almost any direction will get you somewhere. If you just want to keep moving, it doesn't matter which direction you chose. This time we chose to go to the Philippines. In a couple of days we'll wander into some sleepy little village on the east side of the Philippine Islands, drop an anchor, and start to get to know it, and then, about the time when we start to get comfortable, we'll start planning to leave.
Of course, it is Asia this time: that's another problem. Asia is big. We're pretty sure we can make it out of the Philippines in a few months, we're on a schedule now, and it includes getting to Hong Kong by June. We even have a passenger. Carol Pearl will meet us in Manila and depart in Hong Kong. She has flights booked, so we'd better not get lost in the Philippines before we get Carol to Hong Kong, at least not this time. But three months seems a mite brief for a country with 7000 islands. Maybe we'll have to come back here after China. After China? The mind boggles. So that's how it begins. You plan to go to the Philippines, then China, then, then, then, pretty soon you've been in Asia for ten years. Sidetracked again on a world cruise.
Fred & Judy, SV WINGS, Pacific Ocean
08N 131E