All our island hopping up to this point had been done in one large wooden boat. So on or last full day in Indonesia when we were scheduled to go on a jungle hike to a waterfall I was a little confused when the staff had us get into two smaller boats. We motored on the open sea for about twenty minutes until we turned inland and started making our way up a wide, lazy river. On either side, the banks were dense with mangrove trees which are common in the tropics. They typically grow in the brackish water where fresh-water streams pour into the salty sea water. These bush-like trees send out a complex network of exposed roots that help to secure the soil in the mangroves. Mangrove trees form an important part of the local ecosystems by preventing erosion.
It would be an understatement to say that serving in two Indonesian villages had given me a fresh appreciation for modern life in Hong Kong or Chicago. Yet, those visits had not prepared me for the scattered dwellings we saw on the river bank as we made our way through the mangrove. It was not only the primitiveness of the homes on stilts, but the utter isolation that grabbed my attention. These humble abodes which were fifteen minutes upriver in the middle of nowhere, made the villages we’d been in seem like teeming metropolises. Try as may, I couldn’t even begin to image what life was like out here.
As the river twisted its way deeper and deeper into the Indonesian jungle, it became increasing narrow. It became so narrow that we could have reached out from either side of the boat and touched the mangrove trees. In fact, several of us did. Suddenly, it occurred to me why we had to take two smaller boats. As the river got more and more narrow, it simply wasn’t big enough to handle the larger boat.
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