At every port there are dozens of things on the list of Things to Do and Things to Buy. Sydney was no exception. Again we hauled out and gave the Phoenix her biannual face lifting, using the Cruising Club’s slip. I arranged, at last, to replace the faulty chain plates that had been much on my mind for a reason which is obvious: there are two things that must not fail on a seagoing yacht—the masts and the rudder. The chain plates hold the shrouds that support the mast. Period.
I laid in a supply of essential navigation aids for the next stage of our trip—pilot books, light lists, tide tables, and nearly a hundred charts, enough to get us to Durban, South Africa. As was always the case, many of the charts were for places we did not expect to visit, but plans have a way of changing—or of being changed—as one goes along, due to weather conditions, local advice, or dire necessity. Not too long before us, a yacht bound for Australia had been blown off course in a storm and had tried to put in to Lord Howe Island—without a chart. It had ended up on a reef, with the vessel a total loss.
There were the usual visas to arrange for, too. South African officials raised no objections, in spite of their well-known color bar, and even assured me that Japanese citizens were considered “European.”
The very young fellow at the Indonesian Consulate, however, was hesitant.
“Just why do you wish to visit my country, sir?” he asked politely.
I had a sudden hunch that the usual reasons would not be enough. It is one thing to fly to Jakarta, like any self-respecting tourist, there to follow the beaten track on conducted tours before flying home again—having “seen” Java. It is quite another to request permission to sail in, to poke around in ports where there are no other foreigners and no liking for them, possibly to get oneself in a jam and even create an international incident. (Only recently, exactly that did happen, the yacht ended up a wreck and the yachtsman landed in jail.)
I reminded myself that, once again, we were going against all local advice in going to Indonesia at all. “Give the whole bloody place a miss!” was the way one recently returned Aussie phrased it. “They’re insolent puppies, the whole bloody lot of them. Threw me passport right on the floor, they did, and made me pick it up myself!” But we had heard similar unfavorable comments about almost every port on our itinerary—and since our informant had struck me as rather an “insolent puppy” himself, we reserved judgment.
The young Indonesian was waiting, not at all insolently, for my reply.
“The main reason we want to go is because Indonesia is a young republic. You won your independence as we did, by revolution, but you’re still having a lot of problems to face and the going is hard. Back in the United States, we’re not young and eager any more—we’ve forgotten our beginnings. We’d like to see how it’s going with you—and how you’re meeting your problems. And we’d like to be in Indonesia on August seventeenth to help celebrate your eleventh birthday.”
There was a long pause. Then the young man said, “Could you come back in two weeks?”