We were supposed to spend our first night in a beach-side resort. But that’s not exactly how things worked out. One hour into our two-hour boat ride, our host Eric and his local Indonesian boat driver had to make a command decision. It was late afternoon and we were going to be losing our last remaining light soon. Furthermore, the sea was choppy and it was low tide meaning that all kinds of hazards that would normally be submerged during high tide were now exposed.
We were on the last leg of our day-long tip from Hong Kong to Telanus Beach in Indonesia for a one-week service trip. So far we had flown, ridden a bus, taken a large ferry from Singapore to Batam, and then ridden a second bus. And now we were on a narrow, hand-made wooden boat that was just big enough for the 21 of us plus the four or five staff members from Telunas Beach who had joined us.
When we had walked out on the pier earlier that afternoon, out of the dozens of nearly identical wooden boats in the harbor, it had been easy to identify ours: it was the only one with all the bright orange life jackets (oh, those silly Westerner and their preoccupation with safety).
Eric climbed over the students who were now wearing those life jackets to fill me in on what he and the driver had decided. “The combination of darkness, choppy water, and low tide is making it too hazardous to continue. When my local driver tells me he is hesitant to go on, it’s time to stop. We are still an hour away from Telanus Beach, but I know of a village about five minutes away. We’ll see if they can put us all up for the night.”
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