Indonesia. Is it 18,500 islands or 13,700 islands? No matter, it’s a bloody lot of islands and if you want to explore them by motorcycle then you’ll be taking a few boat trips courtesy of the government operated ASDP shipping. ASDP? The Angkatan Sungai Danau Penyeberangan - the Rivers and Lakes crossing Transportation Service. Don’t know why they left “seas” out of the equation because the vast majority of their work is ferrying goods and passengers BETWEEN islands rather than ACROSS lakes or UP and DOWN rivers but there you go. Even after 50 years of engagement with Indonesia there’s still a lot I don’t understand!

ASDP Ferry approaching Poto Tano, West Sumbawa
The first sea journey I made in the region was way back In 1970. Me and a school mate, Ken Mounsey, had hitched from Melbourne to Darwin, flown to Baucau in East Timor and hitched to Dili, the capital. From there we took TAT’s (Transporte Aereo de Timor) DC3 to Kupang. Taking off from a grass strip we received a jam bun and a single sweet wrapped in cellophane before touching down an hour later at Penfoei Airfield on the outskirts of Kupang.
Delay leaving Pelabuhan Kayangan (The Port of Heaven) in East Lombok. As you can see a truck is being used to tow a broken down vehicle out of the ferry before we can get underway.

For some reason Kupang has always had a strange fascination for me. I remember asking a German traveler, a fellow occupant of Dili’s “Hippie Hilton” beach hut, what he thought of Kupang. His swift one-word, spat-out answer - “Scheisse”! I didn’t understand German but some words don’t require translation!

Kupang was dusty, scruffy and haphazard. It was a real melting pot. Being the largest city between Bali and Darwin it attracted people from all over Eastern Indonesia. It had a long history. The Portuguese, the Dutch and the British fought over it for 200 years. Captain Bligh of Mutiny on the Bounty fame landed there in June 1789 having sailed a 7mt open boat 6700kms from Tonga in 41 days. One of his crew, the botanist Nelson, is buried in Kupang’s Nun Hila Cemetery. Kupang was flattened by bombing in World War Two as it was a Japanese stronghold.

We only spent a couple of days there because, as luck would have it, there was a Pelni ship, the “SS Tobelo” bound for Surabaya due to leave so we rushed down to Tenau Harbour and bought a couple of deck class tickets for a song. Needless to say the trip was a bit of an eye opener. There were only a few civilian passengers. We slept atop the hatches. We were fed rice, fish heads and a slice of fried egg three times a day but the supply of black tea was endless. Below deck were hundreds of soldiers returning to Java after a stint in the Moluccas. Each had a parrot in a cage and the noise they made was deafening. The trip took the best part of four days - a P&O cruise it was not! - but we arrived with all limbs intact and a deeper appreciation of what life is like for the common people.

(I’ll add more as time goes by. The purpose is to give readers an insight into what to expect on Ferry trips in current times)