Hi All

A few pics of Mumbai India for you to enjoy.  The people are wonderful, polite and very sincere. The cuisine, mouth watering, and a very colourful place to visit.  The history is mind blowing.  They are very hard workers.  Poverty stricken areas and rich areas are each others neighbours.  They are happy within.  The want to survive is greater the want of material wealth here.  This place is definately worth visiting and exploring…

We’d like to thank the people who we met in Mumbai and made it possible to reprovision the boat plus arrange a dentist for Gavin, and restock us with fuel.  They know who they are.   Mumbai was an emergency stop for us, to enable us to travel with our group up the coast of India to travel safely in numbers.   We did not have visas to go ashore as we had been misinformed regarding the NZ passport allowances.  As a NZ’er you can gain entry visas only on arrival into India via International Airports NOT by seaport.   This made things very challenging for us not to say the least.  Although is there is no difference in the stamps that go in our passports from ones that are entered into via an airport, the Indian authorities are not at all interested in making allowances.    Little did we know how treacherous the next part of our journey to Salalah Oman would be.

Dear Friends, Family and Followers

Apologies for not updating our blog.  As one of our rally boats were pirated and murdered by Solmalian Pirates, just off the coast of Oman, of which the Solmalian pirates then captured another yacht with a family of 3 children and 4 adults (they are still being held captive with an unknown outcome at this stage), I will not be updating our blog until our yacht has safely arrived to it’s destination.   The process has been a very long one, of which the girls are in one country and dad is with the boat in another country, until such time we can meet up with him.  Sorry for being so vague but pirates can also peruse the internet and they may have our details from the first pirated vessel they took ruthlessly and murdered.  We are safe and that is all that matters.  So please be patient and until it is the right time we will then start updating our blog again.

Hi everyone,

Yes we have made it into Cochin India.  What a terrific place to be.  The people are friendly, it’s warm and muggy, but when the sun goes down out comes the mozzie battalion with full vengeance!  Walking down the main street is like a looking at a technicolor coat with all the beautiful saris, and yes Shae and I have invested in one.   As this place is predominately muslin, we are not allowed out without covering our shoulders and wearing dresses/skirts/shorts past our knees, so as to not offend the local people.  We have managed to look around at a place called Fort Cochin, Jew town and do a little shopping in what they call Broadway.  We have really enjoyed our time here and wish we were able to stay a little longer but this is not the case.  Unfortunately the information that we have been given by the Blue Water Rally directors (this is why we joined the BWR and paid for the information and support to be correct) had been incorrect regarding NZ’ers getting visas on arrival.  This was only if you flew in to 4 nominated international airports that you can receive a visa in this manner.  So Gavin and I had to fight tooth and nail with the Indian Immigration with the wonderful help of The New Zealand High Commission, to obtain an emergency visa.  The NZ High Commission have been absolutely fabulous.  As we had been waiting for our prop to arrived from Belgium via NZ, NEVER EVER EVER use DHL!!  They are a very incompetent company internationally and do not understand that when a product is under warranty as it is faulty that there is no charge, yet the incompetency and the understanding of the basics of english does not register in their intellectual ability.  So waiting for an urgent propeller to be delivered before our departure and requesting a commercial invoice to the value of the product, even though it’s a nil charge, they cannot compute.  Then to find out after all this time that they had the original invoice stating value of product.  This has now put us in a compromising position, we now have to collect the prop from Mumbai under emergency visa status again with the assistance of the NZ High Commission.  DHL India’s lack of customer service in abhorrent.  Basically 4 days of pissing around waiting for them to organise themselves in DHL India undermining the credibility of a NZ company stating that there is something not right about this shipments nil value (even though it states quite clearly on the invoice WARRANTY REPLACEMENT OF FAULTY PRODUCT NIL VALUE) is not acceptable.   Our shipment was held to ransom, in plain DHL India english, you don’t supply the invoice you don’t get your shipment.  Then on top of that we paid for an express delivery, what an absolute joke.  Anyway enough of that enjoy the photos…