Another cyclone and another delay. When we left Townsville last week, our intended destination was Kupang, Indonesia. It was an ambitious non-stop passage to attempt still inside cyclone season, but we figured what the hell…. not that we had much of a choice, given our expired Australian visas. The plan was still looking solid five days after we left. Coming through the Torres Straights at the top of Australia, we had good currents and good winds, and managed to lay down a personal best: 215 miles in 24 hours. We don’t like to toot our own trumpets, but let’s be honest, we were flying. Then something ominous began to appear on our seven day forecast. A low pressure system expected to deepen into a severe cyclone, on a track directly for Kupang about 24 hours after our estimated arrival there. We did a quick check with Bob McDavitt, the undisputed guru of weather forecasting in this part of the world at New Zealand’s Met Office, and his advice was to play it safe given the high possibility of fierce westerly winds and no good shelter in Kupang,

Darwin is the most northerly major city in Australia and a place we didn’t expect we’d have a chance to see. Being the only real city on the northern coast, it was the obvious place to wait out the storm. Invoking our new favorite maritime rule, we entered Darwin without valid visas “seeking shelter from storm or tempest”, and the Australian authorities were again welcoming and understanding given the circumstances… good ‘onya mates!

As it turned out, the cyclone never developed into anything serious, and Kupang escaped the nasty winds that were forecasted, so in the end our detour was unnecessary. Being such a historic city, and the site of a WWII bombing blitz courtesy of the Japanese, we found the city worth the visit from a curiosity perspective, but probably would skip it next time around (absent another cyclone). With the weather now all-clear for the three days remaining in our passage to Kupang, we’ve pulled the anchor and are now watching Darwin (and Australia) disappear into the distance behind us.

Since rounding the top of Australia, we’re in the Indian Ocean now, meaning the entire Pacific is astern (contrary to my earlier comment, where I wrongly said the Pacific reaches all the way to Singapore). The water is a different color over here, deep green instead of deep blue, and we have no clue why that is. The winds, which prevail from the southeast, are generally lighter than on the Pacific side as we’re in the wind shadow of Australia. So with the stormy weather now gone, the skies clear and a steady gentle breeze, the spinnaker is flying and it’s time for some relaxation on the deck.

Our silence for the past couple weeks is because we’ve had little of interest to report. As always is the case, the weeks leading up to our big crossings are consumed by various chores and prep work. This time we’re getting ready to spend almost a year in the developing world, so our “to do” list has been even more enormous than normal. In addition to the usual repairs and provisioning, we’ve been dealing with seemingly absurd amounts of bureaucracy, particularly obtaining our cruising permits and visas for Indonesia (which took over three months start to finish). We’re also heading into disease affected areas, so we’ve refreshed our vaccinations, stocked up on malaria meds, and rigged mosquito nets over the beds. We’re finally feeling prepared, and with cyclone season now ending, we’re ready to say goodbye to Australia and get on with our new adventure into Asia… a very exciting moment for us.

Over the past few months, Australia really did come to feel like home, and we can’t deny we felt some temptation to simply stay here and begin a whole new life. That’s the funny thing about this sort of around the world journey… as people gain new experiences in different places, their priorities change, and soon the original purpose of the voyage gives way to new ones developed along the way. So when we tally up the stories we hear from other drunken sailors like us, we see very few journeys that even resemble the starting plan, and that makes more sense to us now than we could possibly have imagined two years ago. For us though, the original purpose of our journey, to explore the world, remains firmly in tact. So today we sail on for better or worse, and in doing so we watch our hypothetical Australian lives evaporate into the ether, albeit with a pinch of regret.

Our departure from Australia on April 16th comes two days after our Australian visas expired. We can pass the blame for that on to Cyclone Ita, which has just torn down the Queensland coast and forced us into a safe anchorage for several days, causing us to miss our departure deadline. Under admiralty law, most countries would forgive any illegal stay caused by “storm or tempest” and in our case here today, it appears Australia will respect this ancient maritime tradition.

Our attention now turns to the almost 2000 mile passage between us and West Timor in southern Indonesia. The challenge with this passage, other than the occasional cyclone, is the Great Barrier Reef which is a sprawling submerged obstacle extending all the way past the the top of mainland Australia. Our strategy is to forego the calm protected waters inside the reef and instead sail outside the reef in the open Pacific for most of the way up the coast. The winds are stronger out there, there’s less ship traffic, and we won’t need to worry about zigzagging through the thousands of reefs and islands that make up the Great Barrier Reef. We remain utterly baffled by the early explorers who navigated these waters without charts, GPS, or weather forecasts.

So it’s time to cast away from the customs dock and become reacquainted with our old friend, the Sea. We’re hoping for a twelve-day passage, but with the weather here still very unpredictable it’s anybody’s guess.

The Great Barrier Reef is one of those places that everybody knows about but, surprisingly, hardly anybody’s been to, mainly because its remote position nearly 100 miles off the east coast of Australia makes it an awkward place to access. The entire reef sits below the surface of the water, meaning there’s no dry land, no beaches, no trees, and of course no buildings…. anywhere, so the attraction is fairly limited unless you’re into diving, snorkeling, or remote adventuring. Even most sailors prefer to stay away from the place because of the navigational challenges. With hardly any visible navigational aids, even a momentary lapse of concentration could easily lead to the dreaded noise of thick fiberglass shattering across a coral reef… the shipwrecks here are too numerous to count. Add to this the unpredictable weather, the extreme tidal fluctuations making depths difficult to determine, the intense tidal currents flowing throughout every channel, nook, and cranny, sometimes reaching 10 knots or more, and it starts to make sense why the place feels almost completely deserted.

For the few that do make it to the reef, the rewards include some of the best reef diving and snorkeling in the world. The best diving is to be found around the three-reef cluster of Bait, Hardy, and Hook Reefs, so the tour companies here have setup a floating complex that looks like something from the movie Waterworld – floating restaurant and hotel, barges for helicopter landing pads, even a water landing strip for seaplanes in the protection of the Hardy Reef lagoon. If global warming ever sinks the world beneath the ocean’s surface, perhaps this is what the future holds for us.

But everything that’s truly interesting on the Great Barrier Reef happens beneath the surface. Here’s where we were grateful for our experiences with Tarzan last year…. thanks to him we’ve become comfortable exploring these reefs and are free diving much deeper than we were back when we were mere “snorkelers” in the Caribbean islands. It’s not just the diversity of the moving sea life that are the big attraction (everything from tropical fish and sharks to rays and turtles), but also the extraordinary coral formations that often appear to be born from design. The “Stepping Stones”, for example, are a series of 18 coral pillars reaching up from the depth of the ocean floor to within inches of the water’s surface – a theist and an atheist would settle no debates out here.

Before we headed out to the Reef, we picked up our Californian friend, Shane, who’s curiosity about the Earth’s most remote and unusual places rivals our own. With the weather being hit and miss during this time of the year, we were lucky to get a few days of relative calm to explore like we’ve just done. But with an incoming storm now threatening to send swells across the surface of the shallow reefs (20 knots of wind is about the limit for comfort and safety out here), our time out here has reached its natural limit.

We’ve made huge progress in preparing for our clean water filter delivery mission to Indonesia in May, and we’re thoroughly grateful for the overwhelming kindness and generosity of our friends, family, and blog followers, who collectively have already funded 33 of our 50 filter goal – Thank you!! We’ll be placing the order for your filters in the next week or so and will be delivering them in late May or early June as we sail through the Indonesian islands. And the good news and for anyone still considering participating is that we still have room for 17 more filters… for more info on our mission, please click here.

So with the wind now starting to lift, the rig beginning to howl, and the chop becoming irritating, we’re pulling the anchor and trading our new Waterworld for something a lot more tangible: the Australian mainland.

It seems that every place we come across has developed its own unique character traits and often unforgettable identity…. drawing charicatures of our sailing destinations would be a simple task. The Whitsundays is certainly no exception. Like St Tropez in the Med and St. Bart’s in the Caribbean, the Whitsundays is another playground for the rich and famous, which brings a certain amount of obscenity to the experience. It’s also the case that Australia’s economy has continued to boom right through the so called “global financial crisis”, which means the tourist trade continues to bring “normal” people out to this area for the diving, beaches, nightlife, and island hopping. And while we normally hate being around a bunch of tourists, we make an exception for Aussies because frankly, things are just a lot more fun when Aussies are around.

So the cyclone blew through last week without major incident and left in its wake five days of nearly flawless weather, which left us free to explore the lower end of the Whitsundays group. The steep tides and swift currents can make sailing and anchoring a challenge, but not enough to be a real hassle. The diversity in such a small area here is remarkable, with Hamilton island being a developed ritzy resort island with 5 star dining, golfing, go kart racing, and winding turquoise swimming pools, and the adjacent Whitsunday Island being an almost untouched national park with hiking trails and seemingly endless white sand beaches.

With cyclone season winding down, we should start seeing clear weather for leaving Australia in about a month. So we’re planning our route for coming months and noting we’ll soon be heading into some of the most poverty stricken parts of southern Asia, which sit surprisingly close to Australia’s northern coast. It’s difficult to understand how it came to be that just 1750 miles from our current position here among the megayachts and helicopters, villages in Indonesia still don’t even have access to clean drinking water and other basic needs. So instead of just sailing through and observing the problems like we usually do, we’re going to try to become a small part of the solution. Our plan is to deliver clean water drinking filters to villages in some of Indonesia’s most poverty stricken islands where Waves for Water, a charity devoted to the problem of contaminated water, has told us there’s a major need. We’re now running a small fundraising campaign in conjunction with Waves for Water, and hoping some generous people will chip in for filters, which we will then deliver to the villagers in May as we sail through those islands. Each $50 water filter will enable 100 villagers to drink clean water for the next five years, and we think that’s a pretty impressive result. If you’d like to participate or know anyone who might, please click here to learn more about our mission.

With our parents heading home to LA tomorrow after two of our more interesting weeks on the water, we’ve got no time to waste. The sun is now rising into the sky and shining down on the world famous 6-kilometer Whitehaven Beach, where we dropped the anchor last night. With the Great Barrier Reef just 50 miles east of here, it’s no surprise that the helicopters are already buzzing above us, and we expect they’ll landing on Whitehaven Beach in front of us any moment now. It’s indeed a crazy world.

There’s a saying that goes “There’s no such thing as bad weather, only different types of good weather.” That’s exactly the type of delusional optimistic thinking that any around the world sailing voyage will put a permanent end to. As we’ve probably said before, evaluating your actual situation as it really is, without optimistic or pessimistic bias, is one of the most essential skills needed for traversing the seas. Weather is the primary cause of unexpected trouble, and when combined with optimistic thinking you have a perfect recipe for disaster.

So we’ve been hopping around the infamous Whitsunday Islands in Australia’s Coral Coast wrestling with weather that can only possibly belong in one category: Bad. The timing is a little unfortunate because Mom and Pop, always looking for some more adventure, joined us about a week ago, and this time they might be getting even more than they bargained for. That’s because we’re in the direct path of tropical low which is forecast to become a cyclone later this evening. Being firm non-believers in the “all weather is good” approach to cyclone forecasting, we’ve been checking our GRIB files and the Australian Met office website several times daily since we left Bundaberg, so the cyclone’s likely arrival isn’t a surprise. We’ve hunkered down in a marina in Airlie Beach and are ready for whatever comes our way, within reason, over the next 36 hours.

We luckily had a few amazing days of island hopping while the low was still forming out over the Pacific somewhere, and we’ve found the Whitsundays to meet the high expectations we had coming in – the island group is small, but its reputation extends worldwide. Once the weather clears in a few days we’ll have time to finish our circuit before Mom and Dad leave – they won’t miss anything, other than some relaxation time on the anchor. In it’s place they get the excitement of living through a circular storm, and being the thrill seekers they are, it seems to us they’re perfectly happy about the situation.

Winds are now gusting above 50 knots for the first time, the highest we’ve ever experienced personally, but that record will certainly crumble between now and tomorrow night when the storm blows through. The boat is secured so firmly to the dock, that if the boat blows away, the dock will surely go with it. We’re waiting now to see how deeply the depression develops and if it will officially be declared a cyclone that will directly impact our area. If that happens, emergency procedures will be activated and we’ll be asked to leave the marina for higher ground…. Mom and Dad, we suspect, can hardly wait for that.

It’s been almost two years since we set sail from Turkey and began our dream of circumnavigating. We have to remind ourselves of that fact using a mental calendar – we’re keenly aware that our intuitive sense of time has been warped and our internal clocks no longer function like they used to. Strangely though, it hasn’t been the common sensation that “time is flying” or that “life is flying by”. It’s more of a sensation that the concept of time, in the ticking clock sense, has become meaningless… at least as a yardstick for measuring progress through life. The replacement we’ve migrated to is a mental tally of our life experiences. And when we look back over the past two years we find a lifetime’s worth of experiences that simply can’t be reconciled with a calendar showing just two years of elapsed time…. It feels like more. How much more? A lifetime.

In the elapsed “two years”, whatever that means, we’ve learned a few things about the realities of moving large distances on a sailboat. One of those things is that boats require much more work than we could have imagined before we started. If boats were like cars, just needing an oil change or trip to the dealership every now and then, our lives would be much simpler – we’d be almost back to Turkey by now if that was the case. Owning a boat is probably more analogous to owning a space shuttle than a car, or at least that’s the expectation one should have as they decide whether or not to pick up the hobby of sailing around the world. We chose to ignore the voices of experience and learned these lessons the hard way. It’s also true that if we had listened to the voices of experience, we probably never would have left California.

Luckily for us now, our car-like expectations of our own boat were shattered long ago. We’re emerging from two weeks of working in the boat yard, which is par for the course, particularly as we’re anticipating very few services between here and our planned destination in the Mediterraean. Even though the passages ahead in the next year of sailing will not be as large as those we’ve already done, this will be the longest period we’ve spent in the developing world. This means our need for a fully functioning and reliable boat is now at a peak.

So the boat went back into the water a few days ago and we sailed away from Bundaberg yesterday morning. Our first stop was Lady Musgrave , a tiny ringed-reef island that reminds of the atolls we found in the Tuamotus and the Cooks last year. With a steady 25 knot blow and quite substantial seas all around us, we’re again anchored inside a tiny lagoon of near perfect calm as waves break on the reef around us. After three months of mostly chaotic driving around Australia by land, a return to the sea, and the isolation and calm that are packaged with it, feels welcomed, like returning home. Even though it was dark by the time we dropped the hook last night, we couldn’t resist the temptation to take a stroll around the dark island, and were lucky enough to find a giant nesting turtle climbing the beach to lay her eggs… just another one of those surprising moments that reminds us why we’re out here.

Time now to pull the anchor and head north to the Whitsunday Islands and the Great Barrier Reef, just two days north of us. We’re still inside cyclone season, so we’re watching the weather like Eagle Scouts and being sure to stay within shooting distance of a safe harbor. We’ve got some VIP guests (the parent type) arriving in a few days, so no time to waste.

When we ditched the boat and took off in a jalopy van from Bundaberg in early December, we hadn’t a clue what we were getting ourselves into. We’d done almost no research into the subject of road tripping around Oz, and weren’t even sure if we should head north, south, or west (east being obviously out of the question). As often is the case when you head into something without any expectations, chances are high that you’ll have a surprising experience…. the bar isn’t just low, it doesn’t exist. So we headed southbound for reasons difficult even to recall now, and have been blown away by each new destination. “Epic” is the word we keep using because we’ve found no others that seem up to the task.

But like every epic experience, it’s twin-edged sword, and this of course brings up a broader problem with traveling generally. Each time you discover something amazing, your standards go up bit by bit, and to be impressed in the future you’ll have to find something even more epic than what you’ve just done. It’s not one of mankind’s most serious problems – few people are lucky enough to ever ponder the issue – but it’s an inescapable feature of a traveling lifestyle.

So as we’ve worked our way down Australia’s east coast, and around Tasmania off the mainland’s southern shore, we’ve been routinely surprised that we continue to find these epic moments day after day. It’s because each leg of the journey has offered up something new and unique, a quick look through our Australia photo albums reminds us of this. When we left Tasmania by ferry a few days ago, completely spoiled by our time there, we asked ourselves, how can road tripping in Tassie ever be topped? The answer, we soon discovered, was this: the Great Ocean Road.

For those new to Australia, the Great Ocean Road is a 150 mile stretch of southern coastal highway that begins a few hours west of Melbourne. You’ll need at least a couple days to explore it, and much more if you want to hit every stop because there are so many. The major attraction, aside from the huge beaches and turquoise water (boring!) are the scenic cliff overlooks, which have turned this stretch of road into a photographer’s mecca. It’s been on our list since we first heard about it, and by the time we finished last night we’d again found successfully found epicness.

So we now find ourselves at the finish line of the Great Ocean Road, and also the U-turn point for our Australian journey, where we’ve stumbled across some sailing friends, Tony and Jess, who we met back in the Galapagos and who’ve just finished up their first around the world voyage. As we cut open their last carton of “Chateau Papier” red wine last night (aka “two buck chuck”), Tony had a suggestion for how we might make our return trip to Tamarisk in Bundy a bit more exciting. Instead of being wimps, he said, why not take the “long way” back? And with that he took out his Australia map and as our jaws went slack, he drew a massive dog-legged line through the center of the Australian continent: The Outback. We pondered his psychotic idea for at least a few minutes: 3500 scorching miles through one of the harshest and remote deserts on Earth in a $1200 jalopy with a leaking radiator. And that’s exactly the moment we realized “psychotic” probably is not the word.

Americans are notoriously awful with geography. It’s a 100% certainty that most Americans couldn’t point to Tasmania on a world map…. we suspect a majority couldn’t even say if it’s a real place on Earth, or just a fictional home to a famous cartoon character. We know this because we are those clueless Americans, or at least we were until a couple months ago. But here we are today, standing on it, exploring it, hiking it, swimming in it, and otherwise confirming its existence in every imaginable way. And for the string of lucky coincidences that brought us to this remote island, further south than anywhere else we’ll visit on this voyage, we’ve become very grateful in recent days.

Coming straight from the chaotic streets of New Delhi to the quiet and civilized shores of Tasmania doesn’t involve a difficult adjustment process. There’s no traffic, no beggars, no hustlers, no rickshaws, no potholes, no honking, no fires nor garbage…. about the only thing common is the abundance of roadkill. Instead we’ve got almost every variety of nature in its most pristine form – stunning white beaches, rugged mountains, and endless rolling countryside. The Aussies here are even more friendly and helpful than on the mainland, and the cities are even cleaner. If there’s a more storybook perfect place on Earth, we haven’t found it yet, and doubt we ever will.

So with time, as always, of the essence, we’ve of course been exploring at our usual frantic pace, trying to see everything possible in a fraction of the two or three weeks Tasmania deserves. If not for this, we might have found ourselves bored at times because the small towns are too sleepy for our taste, and even the biggest city Hobart, a Mecca for many yachties, left us struggling to find something fun to do…. Luckily for us, eating fish n’ chips and sleeping are two things we do enjoy from time to time.

With our batteries now fully recharged and our thirst for nature hikes and stunning vistas thoroughly quenched, we’re ready to hop on the ferry back to the mainland and continue our journey west along Australia’s southern coast…. the Great Ocean Road awaits.

Getting trapped in a place indefinitely because you simply can’t stand the thought of leaving, or don’t see the point in leaving, is probably the single greatest destroyer of circumnavigation dreams. For people thinking about an RTW trip of their own who might be predisposed to falling in love with a city and just not leaving, our advice is simple: avoid Sydney. The reason is because, all things considered, we think it probably is the best city in the world (at least that we’ve seen) and any time spent here seems to immediately put into jeopardy all future life plans, as evidenced by the large and dynamic expat community here.

We could insert here a long list of incredible things to love about Sydney, but we won’t. Instead we’ll describe just one day here, yesterday, which typifies the entire week we’ve spent exploring around the city. We woke up in the Blue Mountains National Park about two hours outside of Sydney. We had been spelunking in the spectacular Janolan Caves and underwater river there, but didn’t have time to see most of the waterfalls or scenic hikes that draw most people to the park. We drove straight to the infamous Bondi beach where we met two of our British friends who are “vacationing” (as far as their employers know) in Sydney, but really are here for job interviews….. with the booming Aussie economy and big demand for skilled labor, flocks of people continue coming from the crisis stricken countries. Remarkably our two British friends already both have job offers here and now are now facing the tough (or perhaps not so tough) decision of relocating from London to Sydney next month. After some bodysurfing and sun bathing, we headed over to the yacht club because we’d been invited for a “twilight sail” in the Sydney Harbour. In most places that would be something serene and relaxing, but once aboard “Zigzag” (appropriately named, we were about to learn) we found out we were actually in a race – Aussies, being outdoor sporting nuts, don’t have much patience for the boring type of sunset sailing we’re used to. So as we jockeyed for starting position with at least 100 other boats all circling around like a swarm of hornets, tacking, jibing, and dodging other boats by just meters, we realized we were experiencing another humbling sailing moment – our open water sailing has done nothing to prepare us for the sport of sailboat racing. But before we had time to think about that, we had already crossed the starting line and were on our way to 3rd place in division! After sipping some beers with the team back in the marina, we headed down to the Sydney Opera House for the Jack Johnson concert being held on the steps there. In the summer months in Sydney, outdoor music events like this on any night of the week are normal. We didn’t have tickets, but from our “cheap seats” on the harbor wall in the shadow of the Opera House we could see the stage and hear the music just as well. With the concert over, not wanting to head off to bed just yet, we sat under the Sydney Harbour Bridge sipping another beer (or two… or three), until finally we wore out and decided to save some energy for the next day.

So with a week’s worth of days like that now under our belt, we’re starting to understand Sydney and we sense it’s a trap. With so much to do here, such a booming economy, such a full social scene, such a fun mix of people, the beaches, the weather, the Harbour, and so on, our time in Sydney has raised the bar on what we expect from a city and we might never be fully satisfied with another one after what we’ve seen here.

It’s time now for a brief change of pace in our journey with Piers and I heading in different directions for a few weeks. Piers will be exploring further south in Australia and heading to New Zealand for a couple weeks, while I head to Nepal and India to join the Focusing Philanthropy team on a charity research mission, similar to the one we did earlier this year in Central America. So we’ll be saying “see you later” to Sydney, but definitely not “goodbye”.

The past couple weeks have proved to us a theory we’ve had about travel for some time. It is that the people you meet in a place are way more important than the place itself. What makes travel so addictive are the experiences you have, learning about how other people live, understanding their perspectives about the world, and enjoying life for a few moments from their shoes. This is also what makes some forms of travel almost pointless, particularly those that shelter you from the realities of life in a place. Cruise ships, guided tours, fancy resorts, and all inclusive packages offer what we call the “Disneyland experience”, meaning they offer comfort, but eliminate most of the great things about travel and should be avoided (in our opinion).

So we’ve continued our road adventure south along Australia’s east coast. We’ve spent most of our time with friends, old and new, who live along this coast. Even the new Aussie friends we’ve met here treat us like we’ve been friends since birth, which is something we don’t experience often, and is also one of the reasons it’s so easy to feel at home in Australia. It also helps that Aussies naturally live adventurous and active lives outdoors, meaning that daily experiences bring something new and exciting every morning.

Here in Newcastle we’ve been hanging out with our new friend Woffa. Woffa and his buddies invented something they call “Greatest Day of the Year”. They pick one day in summer and try to pack in as much adventure as is humanly possible in a 24 hour period. So they go surfing, motocross riding, skate boarding, go cart racing, lawn bowling, wake boarding, and at the end of the day they jump off the roof into the pool, then go out to the pubs to celebrate. Why we never thought of Greatest Day of the Year ourselves is probably because we’re not Aussie, but that sense of spirit and adventure is something we’ll try to take with us when we leave. Our Saturday with Woffa and his mates turned into a “mini Greatest Day”, and we’ll try our best to make it back for the real one in February on our way back up to Bundaberg.

For now, though, we need to keep moving south because this country is huge and our time is limited. Sydney is the next stop on our itinerary and we’re only a couple hours away, so back to the wagon we go.