There is a specific moment on the Indonesian night passage when the wind shifts to the land direction and the boat receives the smell of Indonesia before Indonesia is visible. Not a single smell, the Indonesian archipelago is the most biodiverse island chain on the planet and the smell that comes from the shore is the specific composition of the forest and the agriculture and the coastal community and the specific organic productivity of the tropical rainforest that the land breeze carries offshore to the boat moving through the strait between the islands. The smell arrives before the lights.
Before the radar echo that announces the coast. Before the depth sounder begins the shallow-water transition. The nose knows Indonesia before the eyes and the instruments confirm it.
The Banda Sea night passage carries the specific smell of the nutmeg and the cloves that the Banda Islands grow and that the trade wind picks up from the hillside plantations and deposits offshore in the way that the specific aromatics of the land have been arriving at the boats passing through the Banda Sea since the first Portuguese traders smelled them in the sixteenth century and understood that the smell was the smell of the commodity they had been sailing toward across the Indian Ocean and around the Cape. The spice that the VOC went to war over still grows on the hillsides above the bay where Discovery anchors. At night, if the wind is right, it comes to the boat.
The Other Smells
The Ambon market at six in the morning smells of the specific combination of the fresh fish and the turmeric and the galangal and the citroengras that the morning’s produce vendors have arranged on the tables since four. The Borneo river from the boat on the Mahakam passage smells of the specific organic richness of the tropical peat forest, the decomposition and the growth simultaneously present in the air in the way that the living rainforest produces the smell of its own metabolism.
The Bali coast from the offshore approach smells of the incense from the temple ceremonies that the Balinese perform at the water’s edge as part of the daily relationship with the sea that the Balinese Hindu tradition has maintained for centuries.
The photographer captures Indonesia in the colour and the light. The travel writer captures it in the specific details of the market and the temple and the ceremony. The offshore sailor captures it in the smell that the land sends to the boat before the land is visible, the specific olfactory portrait of the place that only the person arriving from the sea at night receives in the form it takes before the sight and the sound of the place organise the experience into the categories that the travel industry has prepared the visitor to expect.
