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My Travel Writing Scholarship 2011 entry - My Big Adventure

WORLDWIDE | Saturday, 26 March 2011 | Views [234] | Scholarship Entry

In a very brief visit to Australia, there I was in Hobart, Tasmania. As an Indonesian girl with less overseas travel experience, being a volunteer at the 2011 Australian Wooden Boat Festival for 4 days was tremendous. There were over a hundreds of wooden boats from all over Australia, and my country was invited to introduce its maritime culture. It was amazing to see so many people came to the Indonesian tent, admire and ask questions about the 3 models and two full size craft from South and West Sulawesi that we have displayed. A beautiful lady came to greet me and asked did I enjoy my visit to Hobart, and I had no idea who she was until the festival manager came and told me that she is the Premier of Tasmania. The festival also attracted the Indonesian community in Tasmania. I never met any of them before but we had so much fun together. We were singing Indonesian songs, dancing our traditional dances and playing bamboo music instruments called Angklung and invited visitors to try and play them.
I took some time to have a look around the festival. Over a hundred of wooden boats in various style and sizes were parked at the dock. One of the boat exhibitors took me to sail with his boat from Hobart to Kettering, and I felt the excitement as the sails rose against the strong wind, causing the small boat leaned to the right or left, depend on where the wind came from. But what attracted me the most was the Maritime Marketplace Exhibition where I saw the display of many old wooden boats that already made history.
Seeing how the wooden boat community in Hobart preserves their maritime culture suddenly made me feel sad. In the past, the Bugis people from my hometown in South Sulawesi were very famous for their sailing and trading activities in open seas. Nowadays, people build wooden boats only for fishing, for exhibition purpose or sell them to foreigners. They turned old wooden boats into firewood. We don’t even have museum for our maritime heritage. The only maritime related event we have is the Annual Sandeq Race, the race among fishermen using sandeq, a fishing outrigger that many had claimed to be one of the fastest sail vessels in the world. It is well known among the international boat lovers, but received less attention from local people and the government.
The festival itself was a huge success. The cultural exchange was fun. I went home with my sun-burned face and unforgettable experience. In my biggest adventure yet, I am not only found a new interest in wooden boats, but more than that, now I have desire to preserve my country’s maritime culture that has been abandoned for years. It’s not going to happen tomorrow, but someday when I write more about it and people can read it, I hope they will realize how important it is to appreciate the maritime heritage of our country.

Tags: #2011writing, travel writing scholarship 2011