Past the end of the world

A village on the coast of eastern Seram Island, only accessible on foot or by boat. Photo: Thatcher Cook for Mercy Corps

As we stood on a small dock overlooking the aquamarine waters that lap Tehoru, a port town on Indonesia's Seram Island, my colleague Eldo made an interesting comment.

"Some people — even out here — say this is the end of the world," he said.

But to me, it felt like the beginning of something. We'd already driven almost four hours from the city of Masohi, Seram's chief town, to reach Tehoru. Once there, we'd eaten a lunch of local venison and vegetables at a small warung — a traditional food stall — on the waterfront as more colleagues sought to hire a speedboat that would carry us to our destination, the village of Ahinulin, where Mercy Corps is doing community development work.

Ahinunlin lay at least two hours from Tehoru — "the end of the world" — across a particularly choppy stretch of the Banda Sea. No roads lead there — it's only lush mountains and forbidding jungles from here on out, all the way to the eastern tip of Seram, Indonesia's "scary island" where ghost-lore and magic still hold sway.

We board the boat and are off, the eight of us — driver, co-pilot, me and my five colleagues — skipping across the rough waves. A couple of times, it seems like we fly from the water altogether. Heads bump on the fiberglass ceiling of the boat. We say "whoa" a lot.

It takes a little more than two hours to reach Ahinunlin because, at any given time, one of the boat's outboard motors is under hasty repair. Once we get off the boat, walk through the surf, up the beach and into the village itself, it's already four o'clock in the afternoon. We have to hold a meeting and do some other work in the space of an hour, so we don't have to spend too much time on the sea at night.

We leave at approximately 5:30 p.m. and immediately wonder if both — or either — of the outboard motors are working. It doesn't look or sound good. The sun is beginning to dip toward the horizon.

By the time the sun goes down, we're not even halfway to Tehoru. It begins to rain, then pour. There are no headlights on the boat — or lights at all, really — so my colleague Miki turns his small flashlight on and off as a beacon to other boats that might be out. I wonder to myself how we'll be able to find the town, much less the dock — but we do, and disembark, barefoot, in the muddy low tide.

We're in Masohi, the city where we're staying, around midnight. The day has taken almost ten hours' travel for a one-hour meeting, but we're all relieved to be safely back from beyond the end of the world.