We flew into Maluku on small plane, about the size of what I fly from Minneapolis to Chicago, but it had propellers attached to either wing. Once we landed, we took a bemo (like a van / bus) into the main part of Ambon. You can take a ferry across the bay from the airport to the city, but bemo only costs $1, even if it is a bumpy and cramped hour-long ride.
Ambon was not exactly pretty. We got dropped off in a market area and had to wander some pretty squalid streets and ask frequently the way to our hotel, seeing as it didn't exactly have an address, just a nearby street. We remarked that if we had 5000 rupiah for every time someone shouted, giggled, made some sort of noise at us or solicited us for an ojek ride, we could have stayed at a nicer hotel, or maybe flown Garuda instead of Wings Air (whose motto is often written as, "Fly Is Cheap".)
The order of the night was to send our laundry for express cleaning across the street, hire two ojeks to take us to an internet shop, and find dinner. In dirty, gritty Ambon where almost no one spoke English, these things might have been overwhelming and impossible if we hadn't just come off two years in Jakarta. A meager understanding of Bahasa Indonesia and an acclamation to less than pristine and hygienic conditions has gotten us through a lot.
The next morning we found a thumb-sized cockroach scuttling out of our bathroom. At that size, you really don't want to squash them (at least Nicole and I don't) so our solution was to trap it under a teacup and leave said teacup undisturbed in the middle of the room until further notice. (Further notice was a man with a can of bug spray who defly scooted the teacup out into a corner of the hallway and sprayed the poor, disgusting critter until it was twitching on its back.)
Around noon we took a bemo back to the airport to pick up Matthew and Scott, two college friends of Nicole's. We had to do some haggling before we left, sadly. For the same journey that cost us 10,000 rupiah each the day before, the driver and his buddy asked for 20,000. Granted, this is about a $1 difference (less even with exchange rate the way it is) but it's still 200% of the real price. And this is an old, tired game which we are familiar with. We knew exactly what was going on.
We said, "No," and stuck to our guns. They tried to insist. We didn't budge (literally and figuratively - we were already inside the bemo). While pinching my skin I said, "Kulit putih, kulit cocklat, sama sama," which translates to "White skin, brown skin, the same." The man's reaction was to throw back his head and laugh and offer 15,000. What... feces of a male bovine animal, if you'll pardon my French. We still said no and eventually got our way. We didn't get out and paid 10,000 apiece at the end.
Matthew and Scott arrived successfully in Ambon after two days of flying. They came off the plane in surprisingly high spirits (maybe they were just dazed and confused?) and we happily set off for the ferry to take us to Pulau Seram. We arrived in time, or so we thought, only to find that Ramadhan had thrown a monkey wrench in our plans and that the ferry had already left little less than an hour before. Well, poop. (A stronger synonym may have been employed, I don't recall.)
So how? as our students would say. What were we to do? The man at the dock with the best English, who was explaining all this to us, informed us that we could catch the ferry at 9 the next morning and that he and his buddies would give us ojek rides to a nearby hotel. Having little other choice, we said okay. While Nicole and I were bummed out that our plans for the night had fallen through, the guys were ecstatic that they were already getting to ride a motorbike.
It wasn't all bad though. I think Matt and Scott were actually relieved to not be on another mode of transportation. That night, Nicole, Scott, and Matt taught me how to play Eucher, a partnered card game. We played it almost every night after that; we definitely played cards of some sort every day.
The next morning the ojek guys showed up bright and early as they said they would, urging us to leave asap. The only difference was that this morning there were only three of them. The 4th guy just didn't show up. Ferry was getting ready to leave, we needed to go, so... my backpack went with another guy, and Nicole's bag, Nicole, and I all got one motorbike. I was wedged between Nicole and the driver (Charlie, the chap with the good English) and Nicole's hefty backpack went between Charlie and the handlebars.
It felt like madness; we had never thought we would actually try the old three-to-a-motorbike thing, let alone with a great, hulking backpack of about 15 kilos. But we were off, zooming to the port. A few minutes in, it started to rain. And a few minutes after that, it began to pour. I discovered that getting whipped in face by raindrops hurts when you're speeding along. I kept about half an eye open to avoid getting smacked in the cornea. There was nothing for it anyway but to hold on to Charlie and hope we got there in time in one piece. We weren't in bad spirits though, we were laughing at the whole thing.
We did get there in time in one piece. We were lucky enough to get some of twenty last tickets too.
The trip from Ambon to Seram was... tumultuous, to put it nicely. We started smoothly, but soon the seas turned moody. First came the lurching forward and back, bad enough for someone such as myself who's prone to motion sickness, but then the lurching side to side came as well and the whole passenger area became a cacophony of moans, gasps, whines, and retches. Not mention the actual vomiting and the sickly, sweaty smells that suffocated the air. Matt - whose mother had made him pack a pharmacy in addition to his first aid kit - had motion sickness pills, but they weren't making me any less queasy, nor were the knocking me out. I was a pale, ashy ghost, eyes closed and damp with sweat, clutching the edges of my seat. When at last I felt like I was really going to throw up - now - I went to the front of the passenger area where a hatch had been thrown open to the bow to allow some air to pass (AC towers weren't working). I walked right out into the open to vomit over the side, but I found that the cold, wet wind and forward facing position erased my need to vomit.
Instead I just clutched at the hatch door and stood on the deck, finding it better than going back into the passenger area. Eventually I got shouted at by someone above on the ferry's bridge to get back inside, which I did, sort of... I sat at the top of the stairs to the hatch and faced outward, face and torso in the open, looking ahead and letting the cold keep me alert. For once I was selfish and didn't care if I was blocking air flow. I wasn't budging from my spot and going back to the rocking, sweaty, vomit noises.
Eventually Nicole joined me. (Matt wasn't enjoying himself by any means, but was managing; Scott felt fine and could have chowed down on a granola bar to pass the time, and told us as much.)
Sitting in the cold, wet wind wasn't exactly pleasant, but with a just-one-more-hour, just-thirty-more-minutes, this-too-shall-pass attitude, well, it did pass. But I sure felt like a miserable, drowned, seasick rat when we finally squeezed of the boat. (Or maybe a mouse, since I prefer them to rats.)
Some confusion and haggling followed as we tried to communicate and negotiate with the driver there to pick us up. The price seemed to have changed on us. Not something to brighten our moods. We got the price down a bit after walking away and trying to get a ride with someone else. Then, it was a few more hours drive through twisting roads and over the mountainous hills of Seram. And then... another boat! This time, it was a narrow and almost canoe-like one that took across a stretch of water to our homestay.
We were four of maybe fifteen tourists total in the village, and the only Westerners, so it felt very authentic; there weren't any tourist resources, just the activities that the guesthouse could arrange. Like in Raja Ampat, we ate what was given us for all three meals.
On our first full day we did a snorkeling tour. The coral and fish were nowhere near as impressive as Raja Ampat, but it was still good, of course. The highlight of the day was lunch: a small picnic with freshly grilled fish (as in grilled in front of us and popped onto the platter) in a shady grove where we stopped for the afternoon on a little island, just for ourselves. It was a delightful lunch.
On day two, a man from a nearby village took us on a jungle trek. The jungle trekking itself was pretty mild, less than two hours I think, though not without some rough patches. Whereas most guides in Indonesia wear flip flops and have a cigarette in hand, chain-smoking all the while, ours was barefoot and carried a machete and a black plastic bag. I don't know how he managed to walk through some of the tighter spots without falling and killing himself with the machete, as I would have inevitably done.
There was a canopy platform
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