📼 This is an archived record of the 2022–2024 Ride for Hope journey. It is preserved reading, not a live trip — links, forms and dates reflect the original diary.
◍ A Ride for Hope

Australia

Plans evolve, again

3 January 2023 Australia

The yacht maintenance is within striking distance now. With a good run at it I’m confident we’d get it in the water quickly enough, as this New Year kicks into gear. Sounds like good news? Not so fast. Over the Christmas and NY period I had the lovely privilege of house-sitting for Lyndon and Gabby who flew to family in Adelaide for the period. It was a very quiet week (or so), with a bit of reading, a few dips in the pool, and more TV than I care to admit (especially since I actually dislike TV!). None of which was at all note-worthy. Really only the weather (ironically) was worth “writing home about”. Darwin storms really are a wonder to behold, at least for a southerner like me. Hot and humid, the wind builds an intensity to almost knock you down, and then out of nowhere a dump of rain so thick that the whole thing is like being in a washing machine. But that week hiding from the proverbial washing machine came to an end, and I’m back at the yacht with Allan. The washing-machine weather continues, even though the house-sit has concluded. And the weather has had even more significant impact on my plans. We talked it through last night, and it is Allan’s considered option that this weather will almost certainly last out the season – several months more of wet, windy, cyclonic conditions. All making the 3-day sailing trip to Timor impossible. So, after already almost two months of waiting, the yacht transit is now officially off. Very disappointing, as I was really looking forward to the sailing itself as much as the practical help it represented. I had also been waiting for nonsense Covid “vax”* restrictions to lift in Timor Leste and Indonesia. I’ve heard rumour (thanks Alex!) just now that Indonesia has done just that, so now have some homework to check for the same in TL too. That gnarly little issue of being unvaxxed had originally just helped me find patience around the slow yacht maintenance. So one way or the other, the new plan is to put the bike on a commercial liner, and fly to that destination. Shame. Really wanted to avoid planes for this adventure, but clearly this will need to be an exception. The question remains – can I fly to Timor Leste and ride from there, or will vaccine restrictions force me to Singapore instead? My next steps are to pick up on the earlier leads in this space, and drive that question to ground with a booking to get this adventure back on the road. Can’t wait! I will keep you posted.

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. Others will no doubt raucously disagree with me calling these restrictions “nonsense”. Did you know that the World Health Organisation changed their definition of “vaccine” in Feb 2022, in order to justify calling these recent injections a “covid vaccine”? WHO previously defined a vaccine as a “product to… produce immunity* to a specific disease” (emphasis mine), but last year they removed the word “immunity”, watering it down in favour of emphasis on the body’s own immune system. Every previous vaccine passed that original definition, but none of the current crop do. Nothing fishy there, right?! Frankly I’m comfortable with my God-given immunity, in preference to RNA-altering, untested rush-job. All respect to any who disagree.