INDONESIA
upstages the drama of Ternate and neighbouring Tidore, islands whose stone horns cut jade slices out of the Molucca Sea. Unlike the clunky, souped-up pinisi boats widely used in Indonesia’s eastern Raja Ampat atolls as liveaboard dive boats, Putih’s handsomely preserved contours wouldn’t have looked out of place in Ternate’s harbour even a thousand years ago. Her elegant lines are the embodiment of a centuries’ old boat-building tradition from the island of Sulawesi; the hand-craſting skill of the island’s Bugis people that gained Indonesia a UNESCO Intangible Cultural Heritage nomination in 2017. Formerly seen sailing across the old 100 rupiah note, pinisi remain integral to the nation’s far-flung shipping network. Still weighing heavy as cargo are the nutmeg, mace and
cloves that made the Maluku Indonesia’s most powerful islands, long before the Dutch East India Company and spice-seeking European colonisers sniffed them out. Behind a modest shopfront near Ternate’s harbour, I find frilly red mountains of mace heaped on the floor, hessian sacks of the seeds they previously encased; nutmeg, lined up to be categorised by weight and lustre; sacks of cloves bulging from shelves, bleeding their Christmas cake aroma into the 40C air. “Indonesia was, at one time, the world’s only producer of cloves,” explains SeaTrek guide, Arie Pagaka, interpreting for the factory’s Chinese owner. “Clove and nutmeg are still Ternate’s main source of income.” Much of which goes east to China, following a route sailed for millennia.
WE L L A BOV E S TAN D AR D There are even more exotic things, however, lurking in the trees of Indonesia’s spice sultanates. On the neighbouring, starfish-shaped island of Halmahera, I find the world’s most modestly named bird. An appearance from the standardwing bird-of-paradise
CLOCKWISE FROM TOP: Top deck of the Ombak Putih; transporting gasoline along the pier, Halmahera, North Maluku; Wallace’s standardwing perched on a branch, North Maluku
is beyond standard compensation for an hour spent crouching in the pre-dawn damp of Halmahera’s lowland rainforest. As dawn edges the constellations out of the canopy, silhouettes of these ‘fairy birds’, as they’re known locally, hover like butterflies. As the light rises, it’s clear they’re not so much hovering as throwing ninja-like stances — if ninjas were equipped with elaborate feather boas. The male birds’ quivering, limb-hopping, canopy- shaking mating displays, seen through the gloaming, appear to have them tangled in the trees. But daylight reveals utter precision between their mad scrambles: iridescent green and cobalt-blue feathers flash as they strike still-as-a-statue poses, impossibly long white ribbon-plumes thrust aloſt like a carnival headdress.
Alfred Russel Wallace, the itinerant British naturalist
aſter whom the bird is named (Semioptera wallacii), knew he had ‘a great prize’ when he discovered the species on the neighbouring island of Bacan in 1858. Wallace’s standardwing was integral among the vast arsenal of findings that led him to discover, independent of Charles Darwin, the theory of evolution by natural selection. But it was the golden birdwing butterfly that really blew his mind. “So great was his excitement that he had to sit down under the tree where he netted it. He almost fainted. He had a headache for the rest of the day,” says Wallace specialist, SeaTrek naturalist George Beccaloni. We’re at the very spot where the discovery was made in Bacan, having docked the ship and hot-footed it across the island’s runway (“planes land a couple of times a day; we should be alright,” grins Arie). We only see one dun-coloured female, but it looks large enough to need landing permission. Aboard the ship, nightly lectures augment such
wild wonders. A two-hour talk on cockroaches isn’t an obvious crowd-pleaser, but the ever-engaging George only loses one of the 24 passengers to the seductions of the upper deck, where the sky rolls above us, a mirror sea of constellations. Daylight views are just as infinite: forever blues intercut with distant, dragon-backed chains of apparently virgin green islands. Villages, if any, are tucked inland out of sight. Arrivals of international ships on small islands oſten
occur decades apart, and entire villages — crowds of screaming children and selfie-requesting adults — greet dockings “like the Beatles arriving in New York in 1964,” says a Texan passenger, John Forbeck. This relative stardom-bask is tempered by seeing some younger kids cower behind parents’ legs, fearing we’re the ‘boogeyman’. The term here is literal: the Bugis people, the Sulawesi master shipbuilders who craſt pinisi were, in centuries past, iron-fisted traders, pirates and sea warriors. Children still fear arrivals from the ‘bugis-man’ — strangers on sailing ships like ours. Despite this, our multinational group of travellers
is a curiosity that gets invited into island schools for cultural exchange. Our offering includes the creative picture books SeaTrek has published on marine conservation. In return, we’re given hearty renditions of the national anthem sung in Bahasa, Indonesia’s official language, along with other songs in the languages of myriad islands. “They’re performed at school every day. We all know the verses, but we don’t know what they mean,” laughs Arie, watching pint-sized children trying to form words from islands they’ll almost certainly
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