Above is a video of me on the island of Seram, as dusk fell and I fell with it, under the spell of enchantment as the call to prayer echoed out through the village of Sawai.

I really can’t say enough about the island of Seram. It is known as the “Mother Island” (Nisa Ina) of Malukku. Everyone is supposed to have come from there. There are a lot of islands in Malukku, but Seram dwarfs them all. It is huge. In the south there is Masohi, which is the capital. It’s spread out, weird, slow, a bit warm, not where you want to hang out if you could be anywhere you wanted on the island. But it certainly has some pretty neat people there. I had an hilarious time with the entire staff of National Park office, who all came together for several hours to fill out a form, and with some of the teachers at the local high school, and became pretty good friends with one of them, Brandon, who teaches English and is visiting from Minnesota. We ended up trekking together for several days.

In the middle and north of Seram are ancient tribes that are still pretty wild. Running horizontally across the island, and effectively blocking the very northern coast from the rest of the island, is a very big mountain range. The highest peak, Mount Binaiya, and a great deal of the island I am happy to report, remains covered with dense rainforest. It gets pretty cold up in the mountains, which can be incredibly refreshing. It also creates lots of interesting micro climates.

Also, Seram sits is a meeting place of several tectonic micro plates, and so the island has been twisted and turned a lot more than almost anywhere else on earth, making the energy there intense. Partially as a result of these, the north coast has its own amazing micro climate. For one thing, there are virtually no bugs. A bright light burning in the middle of the night has no bugs flying around it. For another, the air and sea are very sweet and fresh smelling.

Durian, a fruit that I love and have always wanted to try totally wild, comes in season on its own schedule there, different than anywhere else. This is not the bigger Thai hybridized version that has been bred for consumer tastes and is more widely available and exported, but a smaller, smellier, wilder Durian that grows in Kalimantan and parts of the Malukku. It was simply not in season anwhere else I went. In Kalimantan, it came in season variously in April or September. In the rest of Seram, in October thru November. But in Sawai and northern Seram it had just come fully into season and was falling off the trees. And so I ate as much as I could. Carried three back with me to Ambon. So was cacao, and went on a cacao jag as well.

Had a wonderful few days trekking in the rain forest of Manusela National Park and staying in the village of Sawai on the northern coast of Seram. I would love to spend a month (or perhaps a lot more) on this island. The people are brown and the land is green and both are weird and wonderful and hug you with a lush embrace. There are lots of pictures I took on Flickr: