Tanimbar Islands

This is excerpted from the Wallacia Project Blog.

Time passes slow on a boat at sea. The minutes and hours seem to hang drowsy and suspended, like the heavy equatorial air. Gazing over this eerily calm sea I thought about Wallace. Early sailors called these latitudes the doldrums because of the stagnating calm they would find themselves in after days of no wind. In an era when wind power was the only way to propel boats across the ocean the absence of winds in this hot and humid climate could mean death. Today many boats still avoid these waters because of their alternating calms and tempestous storms. Wallace spoke of both in his journals and nearly lost his life a number of times on such journeys.

Wallace?s most famous sea disaster occurred before he ever came to the Malay Archipelago. Traveling back to England after four years of collecting in the Amazon the boat he boarded caught fire and sank. Wallace had to watch as his four years of collectiong sank beneath the waves. He barely escaped with his life, and yet even after what he endured and lost at sea, he returned to the seas and to adventure ? this time in the Malay Archipelago, a world of islands. Standing in his shoes now 150 years later I cannot help but think of what he must have went through. The long hours, lonliness, boredom, sickness, and unnerving island voyages in a time when this was truly the wild edge of the world. The further I chase Wallace's ghost across the Malay Archipelago the more admiration I have for him. What an amazing man!

In the pre-dawn darkness of our second day at sea the boat arrived at port in the Tanimbar Islands, a group of islands just north of Australia. The scene of chaos that followed at port was reminiscent of Wallace's descriptions. As the boat docked shouting, pushing, selling and buying organically commenced from a steady stream of passengers arriving and departing. We watched from the decks as impromptu table markets were set up, family members embraced, and new arrivals hauled their goods aboard and jostled for space all around us. Soon my hammock was stuffed on both sides with huge bunches of green bananas!

As the days rolled by I wrote, practiced my Indonesian with locals, and searched the sea for marine life. One day I spotted dolphins far off the stern, but otherwise the only thing to break the placid water were flying fish startled by the boat. They seemed to appear like magic, radiating outward from the bow like stones skipped from invisible hands. Late that night we finally arrived in the Kai Islands and quickly bartered a ride to the distant village of Ohoidurtawun, famous for its dreamy white sand bay. We fell asleep exhuasted and woke up to a beautiful new world...