Raja Ampat
Casamara
John & Susan Simpson
Sun 28 Jul 2024 05:12
| Raja Ampat is a remote archipelago in north eastern Indonesia thought to contain the richest diversity of marine life anywhere on earth. The area straddles the equator between the Indian Ocean and the Pacific Ocean and comprises more than 1500 small islands, shoals and coral reefs. The route of the annual Sail 2 Indonesia rally doesn’t usually include Raja Ampat but this year an early start to the rally was offered for a small group of boats to visit Raja Ampat before joining the standard route a bit later. We were part of this Raja Ampat group and have spent the last three weeks there. After checking into Indonesia in Debut we sailed north to explore. It’s fair to say we had a few doubts about what was to come. I’d talked to a local lady in Debut who worked as a tourism officer in Raja Ampat and she was home in Debut because July was Raja Ampat’s low season - too wet and windy for tourists. This didn’t augur well! We also knew that navigation would be a challenge because the area isn’t very well charted. The coral reefs are steep sided so water that is tens of metres deep can suddenly become shallow in a very short space of time and the area is scattered with shallow patches and isolated rocks. The charts on our chart plotter were lacking the detail that we would normally see but, thankfully, we can supplement those charts using chart plotting software on phones and iPads to be able to compare different versions of the same area. Overlaying the charts with Google Earth images can also help us to see whether or not reefs and sandbanks are where they appear to be on the chart. Our navigation station in the cockpit now has a stand for John’s iPhone so we can see the different versions of charts and images alongside one another. Our overriding impression of Raja Ampat is its remoteness. It feels a long way from anywhere, despite being closer to civilisation as the crow flies than many of the pacific islands we visited. The islands are predominantly covered in dense rainforest and the few inhabitants there are tend to live in tiny settlements perched on stilts or constructed on small rocky ledges close to the water’s edge. Boats are the main form of transport, either canoes or long thin boats with long shaft engines that look like chainsaws on a stick. We have seen very few motorised vehicles, and no roads to drive them on either. In one anchorage we took a short dinghy ride to the nearest village, Sawinggrai, and walked the length of the one street from one end to the other, a distance of about 1/4 mile. Two girls appointed themselves as our chaperones and giggled along behind us all the way.  Our chaperones - Berni and Kim  John in Sawinggrai High Street It was an industrious place with people working alongside their homes, treating wood for boat building, doing the laundry, or preparing food. There were two or three little shops all selling the same goods: sugary sweets, drinks and biscuits, all in brightly coloured plastic packaging, and an array of household cleaning materials. Presumably most of the food eaten is either home grown or brought in from the sea; it certainly wasn’t available in the shops. We visited some beautiful anchorages lined with coral reefs and surrounded by rainforest. In the evenings and early mornings we loved listening to the many and varied bird calls from the forest, quite unlike any that we would hear at home. In some of the anchorages there isn’t a great deal of room and we had to tie Casamara either to rocks or to trees so she didn’t swing around the anchor chain. The rocks are so sharp and abrasive that we had to be careful not to pop the dinghy as we took the ropes across, and we used lengths of chain around the rocks because ropes would have chafed through on the sharp edges.  Casamara tied bows and stern to in Balbulol The rally boats that sailed up to Raja Ampat have divided themselves into buddy groups. This relieves the pressure on some of the very small anchorages, provides a bit of a safety net in case of problems and is also very sociable. We’ve enjoyed some fantastic evenings having sundowners or getting together for a barbecue. John and I celebrated our 40th wedding anniversary in July and it coincided with a birthday for Derek on SV Mary Doll. A group of us sailed to Pulau Kawe, an island which sits on the equator, and celebrated with afternoon drinks on ‘equator beach’ followed by dinner on Casamara.  Equator beach party Raja Ampat deserves its reputation for marine diversity, although there is some way to go to reduce the amount of plastic waste in the sea and on the beaches. Despite this, the snorkelling has been fantastic with lots of colourful coral and enormous shoals of tropical fish of various colours, shapes and sizes. Tourism here is mainly about diving and there are small resorts which cater exclusively for people who come to dive with marine life they won’t see anywhere else in the world. Although John and I don’t dive, we spent three nights on a mooring at a dive resort on Pulau Pef. The cost of the moorings included free laundry and rubbish disposal services (luxuries for us!) and we were also welcomed to eat breakfast and dinner with the resort guests. After a couple of weeks in remote and empty places it felt like heaven!  Raja4divers resort, Pef Island All in all we’ve enjoyed our time in Raja Ampat, despite our misgivings. The weather was rainy and windy to start with but as July progressed we had less wind and fewer rain clouds. When the equatorial sun started beating down and the heat wasn’t tempered by the wind we even started to wish it was cloudy again. There’s no pleasing some folk! We’ve enjoyed meeting the lovely local people who generally greet us with beaming smiles and happy faces. They live a simple life but it’s not an easy one. We came to appreciate how fortunate we are in the UK to have everything we need close to hand. I managed to crack a tooth early in our stay in Raja Ampat and after an email consultation with my dentist at home I’m nursing it until we reach somewhere with a reputable dentist, which could be weeks away yet. It’s really brought home to us how difficult it must be to live in such a remote area and not have access to the medical and dental care we take for granted, to say nothing of the mosquito nets, fly sprays, anti-histamine creams, anti-malaria tablets, etc we’re using on a daily basis that they don’t have at all! We are now leaving Raja Ampat and travelling south west towards the Banda islands to join up with the main Sail 2 Indonesia rally fleet. |