The Spice islands

Towering volcanoes, teeming reefs and remote rainforest... We hike, snorkel and explore the ‘Gardens of Eden’ at the fringes of Indonesia

- ALEX ROBINSON

I cursed Christopher Columbus. It was because of him that I was dragging myself up this confounded volcano: scrambling along a path of shifting scree, grabbing at tree roots to secure myself as I slipped yet again.

“Bloody Columbus!” I grazed my elbow after walking into a sticky spider web in the pre-dawn half-dark. It was all his fault. His success had inspired my first travels; his failure had led me here, to the slopes of the Gunung Api volcano. The explorer had spent a lifetime trying to reach the Banda archipelago – this corner of Indonesia’s Spice Islands. But Columbus had landed on Hispaniola instead, half a world away.

Inspired by him, I’d tried to visit the Spice Islands for decades. They were too expensive to reach from Bali in my backpacker days and too difficult when I returned with more money many years later. But local airlines now fly-in, connecting with traditional pinisi sailing schooners – small wooden ships with distinctive dark sails unique to Indonesia and the Philippines – like my ship, the Katharina. For centuries Indonesians slept on the deck of the original pinisis, leaving the hold for cargo and cockroaches. But with private cabins, a bar, and fabulous fresh seafood, the Katharina was boutique-hotel comfortable, my temporary home for a ten-day, 700km cruise around Banda and the forest-swathed archipelago of Raja Ampat – islands sprinkled like mossy pebbles in the deep sea around Papua New Guinea. As it turned out they could be deceptively steep, especially in the dark.