Meanwhile, we want to go diving. We want to go sailing. We want to go away in the van, drink wine, eat good food, enjoy ourselves. We knew it was going to be hard. We're approaching the halfway point in our plans to move to West Wales, and everything is according to budget, and going really well.
Then our friend Tom visits, from the Phillippines. It was Tom that first got us interested in sailing, and, with whom, we got our first taste of what it could be like, crusing from Italy to the Greek islands in his 44ft ketch 'Perky Puffin' in 2007:
Here was a boat that we could live on. Long term. Here was a boat that we could travel on, cheaply. I've always wanted to dive in the Pacific. Rangiroa is near the top of my list. There are so many places we want to travel to, Galapagos, South Africa, back to Sudan, and, it keeps calling me, the Pacific.
Through Tom, we met John, from Tenby. John bought a boat in America, Chelone, and sailed her back across the North Atlantic:
The next year, John sailed down through Portugal, Morocco, the Azores, across the Caribbean, past beautiful islands where we ourselves have since cruised and dived, and then back to the UK. We often pop down to Tenby to visit John - he dives, too.
Then there are Brian and Sue, on their 33ft yacht, 'Blue Bear'. They left Cardiff in October 2010, sailed the same way as John, but then went through the Panama canal and out into the Pacific. They are currently headed for Fiji.
These are not dreams. These are not adventures one reads about in magazines. These are friends of ours.
We need a boat, a scuba compressor and some time. We have three or four years to finish messing about with houses, and then we may be able to have those things.
Meanwhile, we work, and read about others who do. We plan, and talk. It's hard, and we're struggling.
I read this, earlier today:
"We shared meals ashore and on our boat in the Marshall Islands, drank kava with groups on several islands in Fiji, played with children, sang with locals, taught school children in Indonesia, picnicked with locals in the Cook Islands, learned how to collect shellfish and prepare them the local way in Kiribati, traded clothes for local produce in Guadalcanal, sponsored a model outrigger canoe race in the Louisiades, and repaired a solar power system and other equipment in Tikopia. We took locals aboard from several islands for overnight fishing trips, to visit their ancestral atoll in New Caledonia, took a family for two weeks to a Melanesian Arts Festival in Vanuatu and slept on crowded ferryboat decks on the Irrawaddy River in Burma"
The countdown is well underway.
