Month: March 2019

Sailing around Indonesia is not easy. It is an island nation, but with the bulk of the country hugging the equator there is rarely much wind, which means that sailors quickly become dieselers, using the engine more often than the sail. Winds are most commonly associated with thunderstorms, which frequently rise out of seemingly nowhere to whip up the seas and light up the skies. What the country lacks in steady winds it makes up for in tide, and strong currents rage along the island coastlines, sucking boats over shallow coral reefs or pushing them towards narrow channels between small islands. Added to this, Indonesia is a famous surfing destination and large swells pummel its coastlines, making some anchorages unpleasantly bouncy and upwind sailing uncomfortable (upwind sailing is always uncomfortable if the sea is not dead flat – and it almost never is). And that’s just the weather – in this country born from fishing and trade the seas are full of floating logs and rubbish, lurking just under the surface ready to wreak havoc with propellers and damage hulls. And then, of course, there are the boats, which are everywhere and few of whom follow international sailing conventions.

So, as can be expected, our two-day passage to Ambon was interesting. At first the wind was blowing, and we flew along at 9 knots on a flat sea, glamour sailing throughout the heat of the day. Then, in the late afternoon, the glamour gave way to grim reality as we came out of the shadow of the islands and hit the waves and were tossed mercilessly, banging and crashing our way across a disturbed sea. Normally on a catamaran you do not need to tie anything down when sailing, and most of the time we have glasses, books, plates and toys freely out on our table tops. However, this was a rough sea, and as we smashed over wave after wave we carefully placed all glasses and cups in the sink and stuffed rolled-up towels into the bottle storage to keep the glass from smashing. Prepared for wavy conditions, I had smugly cooked early, a spaghetti sauce concocted on flat seas standing ready on the stove so that all we would have to do close to dinner time was to boil some pasta.

Alas, even this proved too much.

Close to dinnertime, I put the pasta water on, bracing my body against the cabinetry as I heaved the heavy saucepan up onto the stovetop and lit the burner while we banged and crashed along. Pasta water takes a long time to boil on our boat (slow burners combined with big appetites which means lots of water = about 40 minutes to boil the water) and half an hour after putting the water on, I was sitting outside looking out over the wavy seas trying to control my seasickness, when suddenly a loud crash sounded from the kitchen.

“Whoa,” I yelled, running inside expecting the worst. And sure enough, in the galley all was mayhem – the large saucepan of pasta water had somehow evaded the metal pot-restrainer affixed to the stove and landed heavily on the floor, near-boiling water steamily sloshing about in the galley.

Holding onto the corner of the counter with one hand and the edge of the cupboards with the other to steady myself on the wildly jerking boat I surveyed the damage. “Could you grab me a sponge and a bucket?” I asked David. “I’ll try to clean it up.”

Just as he approached with the bucket another crash and a lurch heralded the boat hitting another wave and the pot holding the pasta sauce flew over the restrainer, smashing against the cupboard door just under the sink before loudly crashing to the wet floor, discharging spaghetti sauce everywhere. The boat did another violent heave and the steaming water sloshed over the semi-solid pasta sauce, splattering droplets onto the wall as it retreated with the next lurch, the galley floor turned into a shallow wave tank with the pasta sauce an island quickly eroded away by the boiling seas.

It is the first time we’ve ever had pot kamikaze on Bob the Cat and as I sponged up the hot water and scooped up the sauce, I suddenly understood why the galley floor is sunken on most boats – it is presumably to contain the damage in situations like this! How clever they are, yacht designers.

It wasn’t just the waves that kept us on edge. The seas off Ambon Island are littered with Fish Attracting Devices (FADs) – tiny wooden rafts attached to small buoys anchored in impossibly deep waters (some in depths of more than a thousand metres) far, far away from the coastline. Hard enough to spot in the daytime, small, insubstantial and surprisingly far from land as they are, the FADs are near impossible to see at night. Some of them are lit with small blinking lights but many are not, which makes coastal night sailing in this area somewhat like walking blindfolded through a minefield – you never know whether you will make it out unscathed.

On my night watch, I sat tensely alert peering into the moonlit sea, trying to guess the distances to the myriad of blinking light. The radar is useful for revealing bigger targets but the FADs are too small to register, and as an added challenge Indonesian vessels don’t follow international lighting conventions – most boats here just display a set of blinking Christmas LED lights with no colour-coded port and starboard lights, which means that there is no easy way to determine whether a boat is headed towards us or away from us. All of which made for a harrowing night watch where I sat staring at the dark sea through hefty binoculars trying to make out the small shapes accompanying faint blinking lights on the waters, sometimes coming so close to FADs that I could see their shadows on the moonlit sea. The only light relief was a little pod of dolphins that followed the boat, squeaking up encouragement at me.

Even big ships are hard to spot at night in Indonesia. Automatic Identification System (AIS – a transponder tracking system for ships) is mandatory for all foreign vessels that enter Indonesian waters, which is ironic since almost no Indonesian boats have AIS.  Even huge ships and large tows pass us by without leaving a trace on our AIS, and with the haphazard lighting employed by even large vessels, it is a wonder that we don’t end up colliding with anything.

On the plus side, on this particular trip we had a hefty current pushing us along the entire way south which meant that even when the wind disappeared later on in the night, we were still going 6-7 knots, pushed along by a 3-knot invisible tide.

In the afternoon on the second day we finally made it to Ambon, anchoring in deep, rubbish-strewn water in amongst cargo boats and tiny wooden fishing rafts, right in front of the city centre, with a splendid view of two large churches and one gleaming mosque.

Ambon is roughly half Muslim and half Christian, and since the secular fighting in the late nineties the two religions have co-existed peacefully. Somewhat passive-aggressively, the churches here have adopted the Muslim way, and from large loudspeakers in the street a female voice broadcasts prayer and a sermon twice a day. Sound travels far, and out on the water the day starts at 5 am with the muezzin melodically singing the usual call to prayer, followed by a long Christian broadcast starting at 7:30, and the cacophony of loud religious transmissions continue throughout the day and into the late night. Insofar as it is a competition, Islam comes out the clear winner – the mosque starts and ends the day, and the singing is way better.

It is entertaining but loud, and after a full day there we moved around the peninsula and anchored in the middle of the huge Baguala Bay where the call to prayer from the Muslim township of Passo only rings faintly out over the otherwise quiet bay.

Our three full days in Ambon went by in a whirlwind of shore visits and endless shopping, bemo rides, eating out and walking, dripping with sweat, through narrow streets and pungent markets in the heat of the day. It is a busy place and with about half a million inhabitants it is by far the biggest city we’ve been to in Indonesia. Large, dirty, noisy, colourful and hectic, but surprisingly easy to navigate with the aid of a little Google Translate and the ever-helpful Indonesians advising us which of the nicely colour-coded bemos cruising the streets, each on their set route, we should take to get to where we need to be.

We deposited passports at Ofisi Imigrasi and picked them up again three days later. We visited small Chinese-owned shops selling everything from dive fins to lamps, nails, rope and chain and large, air-conditioned hypermarkets where live eels are held in tanks ready for the discerning shopper to pick their dinner. We frequented tiny, roadside restaurants where no English was spoken but the food was exquisite, and a smart upscale restaurant with English menus where the owner divulged the secret ingredients of his popular fish soup. I completed a new round of medical engagements, somehow managing to score an appointment with a dentist capable of doing x-ray (I’d had a sinus ache for a while and wanted to rule out a tooth problem, but had been unable to find anyone suitably qualified in Halmahera or Morotai) as well as a visit to one of the only ophthalmologist in the Moluccas for a quick consultation. We saw churches and mosques and a Hindu temple, and visited the museum where a collection of traditional wedding robes from all the provinces of Indonesia were displayed, as well as three huge whale skeletons and a 5-metre former man-eating stuffed saltwater crocodile from the neighbouring island of Bura.

Throughout our visit we monitored New Zealand and international news, following the post-shooting mood of the world all the while pretending to be Canadians, English or Danish. Only to the immigration officials and the dentist did we reveal our true country of residence, and both expressed their horror at the massacre.

Even when being on anchor there are navigational hazards to avoid, and on our very last morning in Ambon as we were taking the dinghy back to the boat after a last-minute shore run for fresh vegetables, our luck navigating Indonesian waters safely finally ran out. Two local outriggers with fishermen were circling the bay slowly.

“I think they’re setting nets,” said David shading his eyes against the sharp sun.

We slowly drove away from the beach, standing up to see better, gesturing to the fisher in the nearest outrigger, arms wide, asking which way we should go. The nets are fine and have hundreds of tiny white floats that are hard to spot on the glistening water.

“I think he is saying we should go right.” I indicated to David the direction the fisherman had pointed in and narrowed my eyes as I squinted through my sunglasses, trying to see the net on the sunlit reflective surface of the water.

David turned right and we drove along for a while. “He’s pointing out now,” I said. “So we can probably turn.”

David turned the dinghy and increased speed when suddenly I spotted the tiny little floats right in front of us.

“Stop! Pull up the engine, quick!”

David slammed the outboard into neutral as the propeller hit the net and we stopped, the boat lurching forward as the outboard caught on the net. The fine mesh was wrapped around the propeller but still intact and the two fishing boats quickly paddled over to check the damage and help us unravel the delicate net from the propeller.

Relieved that no damage was done we quickly pulled up anchor to head for our next destination: Banda Island.

“You are very lucky you have two boys,” says Anna, beaming at our family from her seat at the table end. She sighs. “I hope God gives me children.”

I gaze over at the boys who are sitting making horrible faces at each other in the dockside eatery as they wait for their lunch to arrive. They are whispering quiet threats to one another and glancing over at me to see if I’m noticing, and generally getting as close to a fight as they can get away with when out and about. It’s noon and tempers are running high. Pre-lunch sugar low has always been a challenge in our family, and today is no different.

“Yes.” I grimace back at her. “Children are a blessing.”

“My husband says if I don’t get he will take a different wife.” She looks downcast, the headscarf that covers her hair only partly obscuring her furrowed brow as she tosses her head backwards. “But he doesn’t mean it. We love each other!”

I lean forward. “How long have you been married?”

“Four years. I meet my husband when I come here from Ternate in Halmahera, my hometown. We been married for four years but still no children.”

I nod uncertainly. “If you can’t have children, it may be… I mean, it could be either of you. It may not be a problem with you. Maybe it is him who can’t have children?”

She looks confused, shaking her head uncomprehendingly.

“How old are you?” I ask, changing tactics.

“28.” She smiles. “I hope children are coming soon.”

I pat her hand. “There is still time. You are young still.”

The conversation is interrupted as the lady from the food stall brings out steaming bowls of mie goreng, the children’s favourite Indonesian dish. They pull one more face at each other and then put aside their arguments to attack the food ferociously, the whispering stopping as their mouths get busy gaping over huge forkfuls of spicy noodles.

We’re in Daruba, the capital of the Island of Morotai. For the last week, we’ve been exploring the dry, deserted, and bizarrely clean islands dotted off the south-western end of Morotai, relishing in the complete tranquillity offered by the isolation of these far northern isles. The only humans we’ve met have been elderly fishermen, who nodded and smiled as they surveyed us, their opaque eyes reflecting the shining white of the sea, answering bagus, bagus (good, good) when we gestured whether it is OK to visit the beach they’re fishing from.

It’s a different feel here from elsewhere we’ve been in Indonesia. There are no tourists, no dive boats zooming around, no homestays or hotels. The locals in their colourful longboats see us and wave but don’t generally initiate conversation, busy as they are heads down fishing, fingers deftly handling lines or nets, cigarettes dangling from their lips. The hazy outline of the volcanoes of northern Halmahera grace the horizon, clouds circling their peaks in the daytime, the sun being speared by their jagged contours each night.

Last Friday we got to Dodola Island, two small islets joined by a long sandspit not far from Daruba. In contrast to the uninhabited islands surrounding it, Dodola featured low buildings in the bushy interior and a garishly colourful inflatable waterpark anchored just off the pristine beach. Curious, we went ashore to the empty beach, where we found a staff of twelve men sitting around, seemingly waiting for customers. We established that the kids could play on the waterpark for a minor fee and went for a walk to have a look around at the carefully painted pillars of the dock, the neatly raked beach, the empty houses and the half-finished building projects, the waterpark-induced squeals of the kids the only sound on the empty island apart from the regular pinging of the cellphones of the men sitting around.

It was here that we met Anna – on the following day, a Saturday, when suddenly the island came to life as a continuous stream of boatloads of visitors from Daruba were offloaded on the beach. Families were sitting under the shady trees, music was playing from small loudspeakers, and a steady stream of lovestruck young couples were walking hand in hand along the sandspit separating the two islands, cellphones in hand as they selfied their love march. Curious to meet some locals on their weekend getaway, we’d gone ashore for a walk and hadn’t taken many steps before a tiny woman wearing wide pants, a sweatshirt and a black headscarf came up to us.

“Hello,” she said, smiling broadly. “I am Anna, guide of Morotai. I have been helping yachts with services before. If you need anything in Daruba, you can call me.”

She was here guiding an American man but would be free to help us with anything after a couple of days.

“There are sometimes problems between Muslims and Christians on Morotai,” she explained, perfect teeth gleaming in the sharp sunlight. “But I say to people, ‘No matter what you believe, you leave my guests alone.’” She wagged her finger chasteningly at us, and we smiled uneasily. “They say, ‘Sorry Anna, no problem if they are with you.’ So, you have no problem here when you with me. Come see me… – tomorrow Sunday, then Monday, come see me Saturday.”

“I think she means Tuesday,” I whispered to David. “That could work – we could go to Daruba Tuesday, see some war relics.”

Which is why we’re sitting at the dockside food stall. With the diminutive Anna to protect us against potential outbreaks of sectarian violence, we are ready to explore Morotai’s history.

Just north of the island of Halmahera, Morotai is one of Indonesia’s northernmost islands, only a stone’s throw from the southern end of the Philippines. This proximity has shaped the large (~1800 km²), densely forested island’s history profoundly. Like Halmahera further south, the Japanese occupied Morotai during World War II. Eyeing up the flat lowlands of southern Morotai, the Allies mustered a huge attack on the Island in the Battle of Morotai which commenced on 15 September 1944. Deciding that the island was suitable for the building of airfields from which attacks could be launched at the Japanese-occupied Philippines, the Allies badly wanted the island, and, realising this, the Japanese threw everything they had at defending it. After a ferocious battle, the Allies conquered southern Morotai which, because of its strategic location, went on to become an important command centre for the remainder of the war.

The seas around Morotai are littered with wartime plane- and shipwrecks, and tanks and aircrafts used to be scattered in the jungle too, until some enterprising people from Jakarta came to disassemble them and move them to the capital for selling.

A local man has spent his life collecting smaller-sized relics and set up a museum in his home in the bush not far from the capital. Here are helmets and guns, ammunition belts and binoculars, hand-wound sirens and dog tags, as well as thousands of empty shells and a couple of grenades. He’s decorated the walls with articles and historic photos as well as his home-rendered paintings of war scenes. A bicycle left behind by the Japanese leans rustily against the wall and a collection of bottles display a snapshot of American life at war – aftershave, coca-cola, wine, beer and morphine, all neatly lined up according to content. We lean in to inspect the faces in the black and white photos on the walls – young men in uniform staring sombrely into the camera, young men with war-time haircuts riding tanks, standing next to airplanes, leaning against trucks, shirts off, grinning and laughing, and young men lying down, faces twisted in agony as nuns bend over their wounds.

Unlike most museums the children can touch everything here – eyeing up distant cows with Japanese binoculars, holding rusty guns to each other’s faces, fingering war-time coins from Holland, the US and Japan. They each have a turn at winding up the siren and wearing the helmets, Matias from the Allied forces, Lukas Japanese.

The Japanese didn’t give up easily and even after southern Morotai was taken by the Allied forces, large airfields constructed and raids sent off to liberate the Philippines, Japan continued to hold onto the northern part of the island, scattered troops hiding in the dense hilly jungle until the Japanese Empire surrendered in August 1945. One soldier in particular did not give up. In December 1974, Private Teruo Nakamura surrendered from the jungle of Morotai where he had been hiding since the war, either unaware that the war was over or believing rumours of it to be Allied propaganda. Japanese holdouts, as the stray Japanese soldiers that continued fighting long after the end of the war are known, were not uncommon in the Pacific, but Private Nakamura holds the record with his 29 years of hiding. A Taiwanese from the Austronesian ethnic aboriginal Amis tribe, the poor man didn’t speak Japanese, Indonesian, Dutch or English, and not long after being repatriated to Taiwan he died of lung cancer. One can only imagine what he must have been thinking for all those years in the jungle, a Taiwanese tribesman stuck in the war on an island far away from home, fighting for a country he didn’t belong to, whose language he didn’t even speak.

Nowadays, there are no Japanese left in Morotai, and the only fighting that goes on is that between Muslims and Christians. Sectarian conflict goes back far in this corner of the world. Originally under the influence of the Muslim sultanate on Halmahera, many inhabitants of Morotai became Catholic when a Portuguese Jesuit mission settled on the island in the 1500s. Resenting this influence, the sultanate repeatedly forced most of the Christians off the island in the 1600s, resettling them near the Halmahera capital of Ternate where they could be more easily controlled. When the religious conflicts peaked in the Moluccas in 1999 and Muslims were driven from the town of Tobelo on Halmahera, many of them settled in Morotai, and the island is currently about 75% Muslim.

At the lunch table, Anna is telling us about the latest conflict.

“It was last week, I had some guests, and they were in a car, and there was protests in the street and fighting. And my guests, they were so afraid.” Her eyes widen. “So, I got out of the car and told the men fighting to leave my guests alone!” She taps her phone and starts playing videos of street fighting, leaning across to show us images of white-clad men shouting, fists pumping, street mayhem at the capital’s government house.

When asked what sparked the fighting, she explains that some politicians from Jakarta had come with packages for the school children, which they’d distributed as part of an election rally. In the parcels were, amongst other things, some biscuits. Within the wrapping of the biscuits was a small picture – of Jesus on the cross.

“That is not OK to give to Muslim children,” she says, shaking her head. “Oh my God! A picture of Jesus, and a cross! They got very, very angry that their children were given that. So they protested at Government House and attacked Christians and the Christians they run, run! Into the bush, hiding in the jungle, waiting for violence to be over.” She leans further forward, pressing ‘play’ again and the fighting erupts once more on the tiny screen.

“Wow,” we say, leaning back in our chairs, nervously eyeing up the families sitting nearby who deviously look absolutely harmless, veiled women laughing in the sunshine, relaxed men playing chess, eating and drinking tea, the only sign of violence the squabbling between tiny children running around with slingshots.

“But no problem now, not a problem. This is last week, now is OK.” Anna smiles reassuringly.

And, indeed, we only meet kindness in Morotai; laughing kids running by shouting ‘Hello Mister, hello Mister,’ friendly people wanting to practice their English, stopping whatever they’re doing to help us tie up the dinghy in a good spot, find the fresh market, catch the attention of a bento driver to give us a lift. People who recognise our children from the floating bouncy castle in Dodola Island shout “Lukie, Lukie,” and high five them on the dock, and, bellies full, our kids smile and laugh, friends again, chasing after each other in the peaceful dockside park.

When lunch is over we say goodbye to beautiful Anna of Morotai who, with her self-taught near-perfect English and great network of contacts has helped us understand a little more of this corner of the world. May she have many, many children and may these children never find pictures of Jesus in their biscuit packets.