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

Sydney Morning Herald

24-06-2025

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.
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 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.
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.
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.
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
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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