INDONESIA
Magical islands and their rich history are laid bare during a 16-day journey aboard a handmade icon of the past brought back to life for modern travellers.
An icon of the past is brought back to life.
For more than 500 years, travel between the 13,000 islands of the Indonesian archipelago was conducted on phinisis – graceful twin-mast sevensail schooners forged on beaches by boatbuilders who passed their trade from generation to generation.
The proliferation of motorboats in Indonesia after World War II and the birth of commercial air travel rendered the phinisi redundant – a relic of the past relegated to museums and books. And there the handmade ships would have remained if not for the tourism boom born in Bali in the 1970s, which has spread far across the archipelago. From the surfing breaks of Sumatra in the west, to Komodo National Marine Park, to the World Heritage-listed coral gardens of Raja Ampat in the east, phinisis have made a delightful resurgence in the waters of Indonesia.
In 2016, I travelled to Sulawesi to study the origins of the phinisi with Raul Boscarino. A sailor and boatbuilder born in Italy, he knows more about phinisis than any other Westerner alive. When the assignment ended, he invited me to sail on his phinisi, a live-aboard dive yacht called Mantra, if I ever returned. When work Clockwise from above: The yacht Mantra in front of Run Island, once swapped for Manhattan; Youth at play at Run Island; A beautiful turtle in the Flores Sea. took me back to Indonesia, I took Raul up on his offer and made plans to join him and his mates on a 16-day, 1000-nautical-mile journey from the Banda Islands to Komodo.
“We’ll stop at islands and dive on reefs in the middle of nowhere, and there will be no- one out there but us,” he says, smiling from ear to ear as we motor south out of Ambon, a former Portuguese colony in eastern Indonesia. “It’ll be a real adventure.”
After a gentle night at sea, we arrive at a gem-like cluster of six tropical islands. The most westerly is Run, a volcano- capped Eden that was the epicentre of a battle royale between Dutch, Portuguese and British imperial fleets in the 16th century. They had gathered to find Myristica fragrans, a spice we call nutmeg that was the most prestigious commodity in the world – many times more valuable than gold – and the Banda or Spice Islands were the only place on the planet where it flourished.
The trade turned its purveyors into monsters. The Dutch were especially calculating in their cruelty. They butchered or enslaved all but 1000 of 15,000 Bandanese and exercised a zero-tolerance policy towards competitors. In his book Colonialism and its Aftermath in the Nutmeg Islands, Willard Hanna recounts a raid on an English spice warehouse by Japanese mercenaries under the employ of the Dutch East India Company who decapitated “three Chinese traders on the spot and playfully rolled their severed heads about the feet of the other terrified captives”.
The Dutch monopoly over nutmeg and 300-year-long stranglehold over Indonesia was solidified in 1667 by the Treaty of Breda – a real- estate deal that saw the English relinquish their claim to the Bandas in exchange for Manhattan in New Amsterdam.
“It’s hard to understand how people went to war and killed each other over a spice,” I say to Oliver Schiedgat, Mantra’s deputy cruise director. “No harder to understand than people killing each other over pieces of paper with numbers on it like we do today,” retorts Oliver.
The stone fortress that once ran around Run Island has crumbled into the sea – replaced by a tranquil village with candy- coloured bungalows. Children yell out “Hello mister!” as I stroll along the beach, and plead with me to photograph them as they
somersault off a jetty into crystal- clear water. A woman sells me nutmeg candy that sticks like licorice to my teeth, while fisherman cast nets into a lagoon where wooden battleships once blew each other smithereens.
At sunset, I return to Mantra for cocktails and canapes with Raul and Malcolm Williams, a crusty old rocker from Australia who flew to Bali on holidays in the 1970s – and never looked back. Back then, Malcolm ran the hottest nightclubs in Bali, but today he prefers to spend his time fishing. While I was exploring Run, Malcolm went out on a dinghy and caught two-metre-long barracudas that chef Augustinos cuts into steaks.
We spend the rest of the week island hopping around the Bandas. We pass Hatta, where two of Indonesia’s most revered independence heroes – former prime ministers Mohammad Hatta and Sutan Sjahrir – were imprisoned by the Dutch in the 1930s.
We stop at submerged reefs that don’t appear on our maps, and dive over coral gardens as spectacular as bursting supernovas and busier with fish than Jakarta at rush hour. Dolphins begin making regular appearances off Mantra’s bow.
At the island of Manuk, the tip of a Fuji-like volcano that rises 300m above the sea, we watch spectacular aerial dogfights between frigate birds and seagulls. The water here writhes with venomous sea snakes that peacefully brush our wetsuits.
At the island of Serau, where Raul once scuba- dived with a school of 100 hammerhead sharks, I catch a fleeting glimpse of a sea cow. I spend an afternoon splashing about on a beach with adorable village kids whose parents still harvest nutmeg – albeit for the modest sum of $5 a kilogram.
On our seventh day at sea, it begins to rain. Three-metre swells pummel our yacht, and about half the passengers and crew succumb to seasickness. At 3am, Captain Edi notices one of the dinghies we are towing has been hit by a rogue wave and is three- quarters underwater. What follows is a daring mid-sea salvage operation. The mission is successful, but the bad weather continues. We plough on across the South Banda Sea, on a rocky 30-hour, 110-nautical-mile crossing that takes me right to the edge of insanity.
When the ordeal finally ends, we find shelter at Romang, a large island with sweeping mountain ranges. There we remain for two glorious days, basking in the sunshine. I see five or six endangered green turtles while kayaking around the island and the once-in-a-lifetime sight of two of these giant reptiles mating on the surface. Raul and Malcolm also discover a hidden horseshoe-shaped lagoon cut straight out of the Pirates of the Caribbean film franchise.
From Romang Island, Captain Edi steers us west to the tip of Wetar Island in the Alor Archipelago. After yet another sensational day of diving, swimming, fishing and kayaking, we watch a blood-red sunset that melts like ice cream over the sea – and the sight of bright red lava oozing from a volcano on a distant island.
The following day, a crew member shouts “Whale!” I run over to the side of the yacht and see a dugong acting quite peculiarly. Dugongs generally avoid human contact, but this fellow circles the yacht incessantly. I jump in the water with my camera as the dugong puts on a show that outclasses the trained seals at Sea World.
Then I notice the dugong has a foot-long erection and must be on heat. Moments later, it mistakes me as a suitor, gives me a big fat sloppy kiss and starts rubbing its barnacled hide against my arm. I yell like a banshee and get the hell out of the water faster than an Olympic swimmer. When I imagined a romantic interlude on the high seas, this wasn’t what I had in mind.
Schools of pilot whales and megapods of dolphins that make the ocean churn follow our yacht’s wake as we motor along the north coast of Flores, one of the largest islands in all of Indonesia. It was here that the Portuguese made their last stand against the Dutch in the 19th century before retreating to East Timor.
Flores is a unique biological ark renowned for extreme examples of Charles Darwin’s “survival of the fittest”. In 2003, paleoanthropologists discovered a number of metretall humanoid skeletons on Flores belonging to a previously unknown subspecies. They nicknamed them ‘hobbits’ after the pint-sized heroes in The Lord of the Rings.
Flores is also home to a number of ‘island gigantism’ species, including the komodo dragon, a carnivorous reptile that grows up to 3m long, eats crocodiles and will happily eat any of us given the chance. Tourists from all over the world fly into Labuan Bajo, Flores’ capital, to see the komodo dragons. Labuan Bajo is also where our cruise comes to an end.
The first time I visited Labuan Bajo, I saw a dozen- odd phinisis in the harbour. Now there are over 100 of these wooden boats, from motor- driven runabouts used for snorkelling tours, to resplendently restored bone-white super-yachts. In our tech- obsessed world, it warms the heart to see these handmade icons of the past brought back to life for the pleasure of contemporary travellers with a yearning for adventure.
“We dive over coral gardens as spectacular as supernovas.”