A beautiful region so quiet and pristine, it freaked me out

For those of us accustomed to myriad distractions, quiet can be harder to handle than noise. In the middle of the Banda Sea, not far north of Australia’s Top End, I’ve noticed the absence of one of urban life’s constant sounds – and it’s unsettling.

Lava flow on Banda Neira, formerly known as the Spice Islands.Credit: iStock

It’s day two on a cruise of Indonesia’s Maluku Islands (formerly known as the Spice Islands) when it occurs to me that I have not heard, nor seen for that matter, a plane overhead since we left Ambon, the capital of the Indonesian province of Maluku, whose airport we flew into before boarding our ship. I realise too, that we’ve not seen nor heard other ships bar one large wooden charter yacht, though plenty of small fishing boats and runabouts.

I could embrace the quiet, but in truth, it’s freaking me out. I don’t think I’ve been under planeless skies since Melbourne’s pandemic lockdowns. Anxiety rising, I access the ship’s Wi-Fi and search a flight-radar website, which shows real-time air traffic around the globe via yellow plane icons inching across a world map in mind-boggling swarms. I look for gaps in the map, places where there are no or few little planes.

Aqua Expeditions boat Aqua Blu combines adventure with luxury.

Lately, “gap in the map” has been code for “flight diversion” away from trouble zones. This part of the world is one of those “gap in the map” places, but further Googling suggests there’s nothing to worry about. The lack of aircraft is only because no flight paths cross it. It’s on the way to nowhere.

That’s despite this being part of the world’s fourth most populous nation. It’s especially confounding when you consider this region was once the epicentre of world trade.

I’m travelling with Aqua Expeditions aboard its ship, Aqua Blu on a seven-night cruise. Though there’s a barefoot policy onboard, we are far from roughing it. It’s a high-end product, but high-end doesn’t mean fussy. It’s undeniably luxurious, the decor is classy, the service exemplary, the gastronomy (by Australian chef Benjamin Cross) faultless. The expedition team is top-notch, too.

Perfect dinner settings aboard Aqua Blu.

In this instance, though, Aqua Expeditions combines the experience of luxury with real adventure and it’s a hard mix to get right. Aqua Blu feels more like a superyacht than a cruise ship, a vibe amplified by the fact she carries a maximum of 30 guests (and 30 crew) and was once an actual privately owned superyacht. Before that, for added intrepidness, she was a Royal Navy explorer.

Adding to the atmosphere are the people onboard. We’re a band of 20 or so across 15 cabins and everyone, even the high-net-worth guests, are attracted to Aqua Expeditions – and this cruise in particular – because they’re interested in the world away from the obvious. With shared interests, we soon become like an extended family.

Maluku Province, which lies just north of Timor-Leste and west of Papua New Guinea, was termed the Spice Islands because it was where Europeans found cloves and nutmeg in the 16th century. The name alone is enough to conjure up James A Michener-style imaginings. The reality is even dreamier.

We are in the easterly reaches of the Ring of Fire, a place of sparsely populated islands covered in lush greenery with many active (and inactive) volcanoes, orographic clouds gathered around their peaks regardless of the weather.

More superyacht than cruise … Aqua Expeditions.

The sea, sometimes plunging more than seven kilometres, has a clarity that puts crystal to shame. Large coral reefs fringe the land, adding brilliant turquoise to the sea’s deep blues and jade green. The many beaches of powdery white sand are mostly people-free. Frigatebirds and boobies hover lackadaisically overhead, with seemingly no fear of humans – or anything, other than having to give up a fish to another bird (it’s always a frigatebird bullying a boobie for its catch).

These days, island life moves at a peaceful pace and villagers go about their daily business in traditional ways, except with motor scooters, air-conditioning and Wi-Fi.

The region’s history is littered with conflict and genocide (and even recent times have seen intense unrest between Muslims and Christians), as a major chapter in global development played out. When spices were discovered by Europeans, these islands were the only place in the known world where they grew and thus became highly valued for their preservative and medicinal qualities.

With high-value scarce resources comes power struggles. Various colonists left their marks across the region, before the currency of the spices began to decline when the British planted trees elsewhere in the 1800s.

The oldest nutmeg plantations in the world can be found on Banda Neira.

The biggest influences evident today are from the Portuguese who arrived in the early 1500s and introduced enduring Christianity, and the Dutch in the form of the mighty Dutch East India Company, which in the 1600s and 1700s operated as a quasi-government entity, colonising, waging wars, enslaving, policing and imprisoning at will. Relics from its reign are everywhere, but not in ways you might expect.

It’s confronting but also a thing of strange beauty to see buildings representative of times and events that changed the course of both Western and Asian history sitting quietly crumbling in the heat and humidity, goats feasting on the weeds that grow in the cracks, cows resting in the shade they provide, birds nesting in paneless window frames. We see these sights during land excursions, as we wander narrow village streets lined with brightly coloured houses festooned with plants. The decaying edifices, bearing the VOC (Vereenigde Oost-Indische Compagnie) hallmark that translates to the Dutch East India Company, punctuate the quotidian.

Despite this, several in our group do get a bit frustrated with the land component of the cruise. There’s a sameness to most of our shore excursions. For me, the least favourite aspect of excursions are the somewhat treacherous landings. Slippery stairs leading from the sea are often narrow, uneven and deep, requiring assistance for even the agile.

Afternoon snorkels.

But it’s a testament to how untouristed these places are that they’ve not been modified for the needs of mass tourism, and that what we see is the un-Disneyfied everyday – a vastly different everyday to what any of us experience.

But then, the people who think this way are primarily onboard for the snorkelling and diving and impatient for it – and I soon realise why. It’s dazzling out there. Roughly, the daily routine is: wake up early, eat, explore on land, eat again, snorkel/dive in the afternoon, eat some more, sleep, and repeat. Though I love our daily island visits, I find myself being just as eager for the water.

The shared excitement of jumping off the tenders into the fresh, clean Banda Sea to swim among vibrant coral and along deeply plunging shelves amid swarms of flamboyant fish deepens the camaraderie as yell variations of, “Over here” to share our underwater sightings.

We’re with expert aquatic guides, but there’s a real sense of looking out for each other as well; the excited chatter about the experience, as our boats return to the ship, ensures this is a bond sealed in salt water.

A skiff ride hurtles towards one of the islands.Credit:

These adventures are all the more special for the complete lack of other parties. This is nature at its most luminous and we are the only humans witnessing it. It’s humbling. But we all agree there are some incredible highlights on land as well.

With a population of about 6000, Banda Neira is a small place, but its history is writ large in the form of Fort Belgica, a well-preserved 17th-century citadel in which spices were protected, and which today is a hangout for town youth and families. As the sun sets on the fort which sits high on a hill overlooking a harbour, we’re treated to a cocktail party provided by the ship’s crew, with song and dance from costumed locals.

During a visit to Banda Besar we go to some of the oldest spice plantations in the world and interact with the families still harvesting them by hand, drying the nuts in the sun on sheets in their front gardens.

Fort Belgica is a 17th-century citadel on Banda Neira.Credit:

On a glimmering white-sand bank across a lagoon from a secluded beach, the crew sets up an afternoon party for us, with drinks, snacks, umbrellas, inflatables and stand-up paddleboards. Sitting on the sand, drinks in hand, we contemplate the fact that the island this beach belongs to is Run, the smallest of the Banda Islands, but one with a gargantuan backstory. It saw conflict between the English and the Dutch with monumental consequences. As well as resulting in the death and exile of many indigenous people and the destruction of their way of life, the island was traded by the British to the Dutch in exchange for the island of Manhattan in 1667, an agreement known as the “Manhattan Transfer”.

After this beach party, I sit alone on Aqua Blu’s top deck contemplating the insane inequity of that swap. Then I notice the peace and the whole no-planes-and-ships thing gets me again. That’s when an enormous pod of dolphins starts breaching around the vessel.

No planes? No worries, they seem to say. They make me laugh, for joy, but also at my own silly thoughts – and at all human folly. In these islands, empires have come and gone while local life returned to its day to day business and Nature never stopped. And that is probably because since those European empires fell, the “Spice Islands” became a place on the way to nowhere.

Such places are to be cherished and relished. And hopefully protected. Long may their seas be quiet, and the skies above them devoid of traffic.

The details

Cruise
Aqua Expeditions runs several itineraries and multiple departures that include the Spice Islands. A seven-day Spice Islands and Coral Triangle Expedition departing in November 2026 costs from $16,430 a person.

Since the writer went on this cruise, French cruise company Ponant Expedition Group has acquired a majority shareholding in Aqua Expeditions. See aquaexpeditions.com

Fly
Qantas flies direct to the Indonesian capital, Jakarta, daily from Sydney and three times a week from Melbourne. See qantas.com

From there, several airlines, including Garuda fly to Ambon. See garuda-indonesia.com

More
indonesia.travel

The writer travelled as a guest of Aqua Expeditions.