Jakarta is on the northwest coast of Java. The Java Sea is to the north. The Sunda Strait is to the west. Bali is to the east across the Bali Strait. The Indonesian archipelago, seventeen thousand islands, the world’s largest archipelago, surrounds the member in Jakarta in every direction. The Coral Triangle, with its seventy-three percent of the world’s coral species and its three thousand fish species and its six marine turtle species, includes the waters of Indonesia as its core.
The member in Jakarta lives in the middle of the most biodiverse marine ecosystem on the planet and has access to it through the day boat from the marina and the resort package from Bali and the liveaboard from Ambon that visits the same sites on the same schedule for the same season year after year.
The Naora membership gives the member from Jakarta access to the Coral Triangle in the form that the day boat and the resort and the liveaboard do not provide: the offshore sailing vessel that anchors in the bays of the Indonesian interior, the Raja Ampat bays, the Banda Sea seamounts, the Komodo National Park approaches, from its own anchor, at the times the conditions are optimal rather than the times the liveaboard schedule determines, with the dive instructor who has been preparing for these specific sites since the previous chapter of the circumnavigation and who brings the offshore approach to the sites that the Jakarta member’s local dive industry has been servicing in the same way for the same season for twenty years.
The Home That Requires the Offshore Boat
The member in Jakarta who has been to Bali and to Lombok and to the Gili Islands and to Komodo knows the Indonesian archipelago in the form the domestic Indonesian tourism industry has made accessible. They have not been in it in the form the offshore self-sufficient vessel makes accessible: the Banda Sea at anchor in the bay that the nutmeg plantation overlooks, the Raja Ampat interior at anchor in the bay where the manta cleaning station is in the five in the morning current, the Banda Sea seamounts from Discovery’s own anchor with full tanks from the onboard compressor rather than from the liveaboard that schedules the dive for ten in the morning when the current is past its optimal state.
The Naora membership is not taking the Jakarta member away from home to see something distant. It is taking them deeper into the home that the offshore boat reaches and the land-based tourist infrastructure has been circling around the edge of. The Coral Triangle is the Jakarta member’s backyard. The Naora leg is the key to the part of the backyard the fence around the resort has been keeping them out of.
