Oooof, what a stressful morning! To start, we were told that the ferry to the next island would launch on Saturday so we showed up Saturday morning bright and early just for the port workers to tell us the boat is not here and to come Sunday. Ugh. We already had a tight timeline because we needed to renew our Indonesia visas and keep pressing to East Timor to set up shipping before going back to the USA.

When Sunday rolled around, we were ready (again!) bright and early. This time, the port was buzzing with many people so that was promising! We headed to the ticket office, Austin stood in line and I stayed with the bike. When I say, "Austin stood in line", I mean he was fighting to get a spot in line and constantly getting pushed out of the way for nearly 2 hours. The Indonesians really had no efficient way to purchase tickets, people would jump in front of you and throw their ID in the port workers face and then he would start processing their ticket. The ticket man didn't really help foreigners unfortunately. When booking tickets, you can purchase tickets online but you have to pay with an Indonesian bank account so we couldn't purchase them ourselves.

After about 2 hours and no ticket, I found a guy at the port that had a uniform on and used Google translate to ask him if he could help us buy a ticket since we have tried for 2 hours and they were not giving us the time of day. I think he felt bad for me so he ended up helping! It wasn't a pretty process and it was quite confusing but what ended up happening was he had his friend buy the ticket online and then he helped us get the bank code to pay the bank at the port. Success!!

We were already a little stressed since the cars had already loaded. Since we have the sidecar, we are extra wide (essentially like a car) so we asked to board with the cars, but the port worker said "NO". Then they started to load scooters. On these wild Indonesian ferries, loading scooters means everyone trying to "tetris" their scooter onto the boat, no rhyme or reason. When it was our turn, the port worker looked at our ticket and said it was the wrong one. UGH! The guy that helped us buy the ticket helped me sort it out at the bank and then I ran back to he car because we knew the ferry was about full.

Austin and I gave the ticket-man our ticket and zoomed down the loading dock towards the boat. Once we got to the boat, the main loading ferry worker said, "sorry, too full, you go on another both another day". Our hearts sank...the schedule is so unpredictable and this would really mess up our visa renewal and timing. We asked if we could figure out another way and he said "no". I couldn't take no for an answer because I knew how inefficiently the scooters were loaded so I trudged on the boat and started moving scooters and making room. Once the other workers saw me doing that, they started to join and guess what...there was room for Domino!!! Yahoo!

After Domino was safely loaded nicely tight and secure, we had an 8 hour ferry to sit back and "enjoy" with about 1/2 the population of Indonesia, haha. The boat was over capacity about 5x, it was wild and hot the entire time. But at the end of the day, we made it to Labuan Bajo, Flores, and were greeted by such an amazing host at our local guest home we stayed at.

Parked in front of the ticket office, ready for the day to begin:

The guys on top has to scramble and move boxes in order for the truck to fit under the bars!

This was when we were told ‘no boat for you today’ but thankfully that was not the case!

Tight squeeze for Domino!