Passport woes & lighning strikes

All the rally participants, bar one, have bid us farewell and moved off eastwards.  And here we sit waiting and waiting for my passport. Believe me, it's not the most comfortable feeling in the world to be in a strange, non English-speaking country, without a passport.  For everything you do here, one needs to show a passport, even for things as simple as getting a sim card for a phone and for sending things via courier (not easy when the passport is in the pack which is being couriered though).  Fortunately, they seem OK with a photocopy in most instances.

The other boat still around is here for exactly the same reasons.  Like me, his passport was full so he applied for a new one but, lucky for him, his wife was flying back to the UK so managed to post everything from there.  He's now got notification that the documents have been dispatched (7 weeks later).  I'm not that lucky.  Despite the fact that the courier company states that they received and signed for the last of my papers, HM Passport Office claim that they have not received it and today is a bank holiday there so I just have to wait some more.  They've had the original documentation since 25th March but only started processing it on the 20th April and I can expect to wait another 4 to 6 weeks after that!  However, they claim most renewals take approximately four weeks.  I'm beginning to have nightmares about what it looks like on the inside of a Malaysian prison.  

If, by some miracle, I can get the whole situation resolved within the next two weeks, we may just be able to catch up for the latter part of the rally but we'll miss out on all the east Malaysian islands prior to Borneo which is such a pity.  If it doesn't come by then, we'll miss out altogether.

We desperately want to get out of here as one of the frightening things about this part of the world is the lightning storms at this time of the year.  They really are terrifying.  The boat behind us received an indirect hit last week and lost a good percentage of their electronics and the boat beside us lost his radar.  If we were to get a hit, we would definitely be up the creek without a paddle as there is no way we would ever be able to replace all the electronics and wiring in our boat.  We now permanently keep our PC's, chart plotter, handheld GPS, etc in our oven and all the little items such as cameras, phones, GPS mouse, etc in a huge tin biscuit box which I purchased for this sole purpose.  It won't stop a major loss if we were to endure a direct hit but may just prevent damage else-wise.  We'd always heard that the Singaporean waters were bad for lightning and there's no disputing that.

On the positive side (there always has to be a positive side), we've managed to get a host of niggly little jobs done and some larger ones as well. And, if we have to wait much longer, we'll meet up with Peter from Troutbridge again when he returns from the UK.  

All in all, I was devastated when we first realised that we would be left behind but I've come to terms with it and count our lucky stars that it's not because of an illness or something gone horribly wrong the Calypso.  I truly hope our next blog entry will be from some beautiful islands surrounded by clear waters and coral reefs.  In the meantime, we wait.



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