Weis Family Expedition! | Time to hit the road!

Expedition not a Cruise

Poppy has been eyeing off this trip from Darwin to Broome for some time now in Saturday's Australian magazine. At 94 he's still very keen to pack in more travel, little did he know that Peter, Julie (my siblings) Susan (my sister-in-law) and I would decide to join him and keep an eye on him perhaps. I have never been to Western Australia so I'm really looking forward to seeing this part of Australia - Mitchell Falls, Horizontal falls, and being in the Timor Sea is quite the remote expedition. We are travelling on a boat with 120 people, but I have been informed that we do not call it a cruise.

Preparations are underway

Pre expedition preparations are underway at Chelmer, the cameras out and instruction manual at hand - Nikon self-timer activations proved to be a challenge, but Poppy would seem to have mastered it, let's see how that goes on the boat. Coral expeditions are chasing Julie for her remote evacuation insurance, seeing we are bunking in together she might need it if I become too annoying although this works both ways!

April 28

Left Brisbane for Darwin today. Luckily for us Peter sweet talked the lovely Virgin Lady at the airport to go in to the fast queue check in so all was good. Arrived in Darwin 3.5 hours later. Only hitch was a near miss with losing Poppy's baggage. Peter left it at the taxi stop and also his bag with his cbap machine, Susan was very relieved when we returned to it (taxi U-turn required) and both bags were there. First drama averted. We checked in to the Hilton and spend the rest of the day wondering around hot and humid Darwin. The town was dead. The city kind of reminds me of Townsville. We went to the local courthouse and saw a lovely Mosaic on the floor of the milky way.

Our lovely taxi driving retrieving the forgotten bags.

Spotted our boat in port on a stroll around Darwin...we know its ready to go!

Milky Way art in Darwin courthouse.

April 29

Today we board the ship - with a last-minute dash to get the best coffee in town, according to Peter, a razorblade for Poppy and some eyedrops for Vena, we were off.

We arrived at the ship departure area which was completely empty apart from Dawn the Coral Expedition Leader who informed use we were the last to arrive, everyone was already on the ship. We were shown to our rooms. After some negotiation with Manfred (our French Maitre Dei) Julie and I managed to upgrade to a better room (on the starboard side of the boat) that with more spacious with a gorgeous bath and lovely outside deck. After that we were off to our very first briefing for Mitchel Falls known as Oomari by the local mob.

A poor lonesome Gibson departing on the Weis Expedition.

Julie negotiating the upgrade to a room with view. It took a little while of eyeballing and muffled phone calls to do the deal. The upgrade package includes a daily wine and gin replenishment.

April 30

This is the biggest cruising day so there are a few lectures on on level 6. After a buffet breakfast we headed off to a lecture by Goyma on the "Ancient Languages of Australia". Goyma is a lovely gentle guy with a really kind manner and is obviously here to give put the indigenous lense on the Kimberly for the "Balanders" (derived from Hollandas as the early white people to visit Australia). He is originally from Arnhem land and speaks frequently of Ian Morris his "adopted" father who seems have introduced him to a career in tourism and cruising, oops i mean expeditions. I know very little about the ancient languages, (I don't recall anything beyond French, German or Japanese at school let alone much history on Aboriginal culture and language. The indigenous words are quite difficult to remember unfortunately. According to Goyma he prefers the term indigenous over first nations people.

Goyma

Our room along with some uninvited but well behaved guests.

Poppy loving the aviation lecture.

May 1

Today we visited the plane wreck on the Anjo Peninsula. It was a C53 that left Perth on route to Broome but failed to arrive. The story goes that an ex-pilot who heard about the missing plane was able to work out where the best place to land would be for an emergency landing and luckily, they found it - all crew survived. It was a nice walk across the mud flats to get there and apparently was the longest walk for the entire cruise at 1.4kms. As the oldest (94) on the cruise, Poppy was definitely not the slowest walker. We were also told to keep an eye out for crocs and not walk within a metre of the shoreline. Peter forgot about this rule which Susan thought was typical of her husband.

In the afternoon we headed off to Jar Island to explore the Gwion rock art galleries on Jar Island - so named because the Macassens left shards of pottery there. The rock art found on Jar Island is stylistically distinct and stories explaining its origins are not part of moder-day aboriginal mythology. The style is best known by us Balanders as Bradshaw art but the preferred name is now Gwion. Julie reminded us that Rods (her ex) uncle had been heavily involved in finding and storing Bradshaw's art. He was a very controversial figure and Julie said she recognized some similar traits in Rod.