Clearing In (?!?) and Heading South

Our Monday morning arrival in Port Blair happened as planned however despite Amanda’s best efforts to have all the correct paper work which included 20 copies of everything, she left me with one task. Clearing out.

This resulted in us arriving without a Port Clearance. That’s like trying to travel without your passport, best described as a cockup. In my defense I was suspicious at the time and asked the Thai Immigration Officer 3 times if I required any further paperwork other than what he gave me until he became grumpy. Well actually he was grumpy to start with, so I got sent away with some papers written in Thai.

After a late night meeting, a declaration where we were told what to write, “in our own words”, and the departure of some US dollars we were also free to depart getting a taste of the local transport.


We decided to spend the first week of our 30 day stay exploring the islands to the south.

Was the navy keeping an eye on us or maybe looking for Crocodiles?

The guys on Ultimate Dream had caught up by this stage so we all headed down to Rutland Island for a fire on the beach while the sun went down.

Things we going along swimmingly until despite Greg’s best efforts to stop me, I had the great idea to shake down a tree for fire wood. The plan kind of worked with the tree breaking off half way up and landing on my head. Ouch. It felt as if my lower intestine had passed through somewhere it shouldn’t have. I got back to my feet, had a few more beers and we all headed home. Maybe then it was Sven’s idea to attack Trevor’s boat with water buckets. This didn’t end well with him falling out of the dingy and getting rescued by the Gadfly crew.

The next day is not going to be good.