INDONESIA


Paddleboard water-skiing is just one of Nita CJ’s


simple yet brilliant ideas. The SeaTrek guide is always out front for top deck dives or snorkelling and seems a natural water baby. But, like many Indonesians who live at the ocean’s edge, Nita had barely seen below its surface until five years ago. “The first time I snorkelled, I freaked out; there was so much life!” exclaims Nita. “The more I did it, the more I fell in love with what’s down there, and the more I wanted to protect it.” So much so, she quit her job in finance. Her Peek Under the Surface initiative now distributes used masks and goggles among children from Indonesia’s remotest islands, in an effort to aid ecological awareness. Apart from the Bajau spear fishermen who fashion goggles from glass bottle bottoms, snorkel kit is an exotic commodity. “And you don’t care about what you can’t see,” says Nita. In the tidy, picket-fence village of Tumbulawa, giſted


goggles and books are reciprocated with handfuls of lychee-sweet longan fruit. Neat plots of farmed nila leaf lend their patchouli perfume to the goat-grazed football field where children, as ever, vastly outnumber adults. There’s not a ball between them but gleeful shrieks fill the dusk, competing with the helicopter whoop-whoop of hornbills taking flight. “They say the birds are more punctual than the imam,” says Arie, as the evening call to prayer sounds. We motorboat out through pristine thickets of


mangroves back to the ship where the deckhands land a squid. Almost a metre long, it spouts sky-high jets of water as it leaves the sea. The boys think it’s gasped its last, but a final high-pressure spurt soaks the kitchen cabin, crew and most of us outside. Dinner and a show. Squid-landings pale against the spectacle of Putih’s


sails being hauled. It’s a task completed with the lightning efficiency of a Formula One pit crew (if they had to wrestle with tons of canvas at rig heights of 100ſt). This is among the ship’s many star qualities, but I even come to love her anchor’s Jacob Marley rattle, which wakes me at dawn for swims in what appears to be the middle of deep blue nowhere. Until, that is, you spot a wooden fishing platform, known as a ‘FAD’ (fish aggregation devices’). “People here live on a truly epic scale,” says Jeffrey, our historian, whose “just a passing FAD” pun never gets old. Swimming out from Putih’s mountainous hull, even


the bottom deck far above my head, her mast poles vanish skywards. Into the ocean’s mercury expanse, mirror-calm but for whisper ripples, I dive. Aſter the rainbow-busy reefs, it’s like swimming through the sky; a mid-ocean cerulean void, strobed with underwater sunbeams. I think of Jago, and dive deeper.


108 nationalgeographic.co.uk/travel


FROM TOP: Kabalutan, a village that’s partly over water, Togean Islands; village shop, Kabalutan


IMAGES: NIGEL RAWSON; SARAH BARRELL


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