beyond bali

The starfish are blue, but not in an emotional sense. Nor are the golden damselfish in distress. After all, it’s difficult to feel despondent when you’re paddling the warm seas that flank Indonesia’s lesser-known islands, with their underwater fields of lilac and gardens of lime coral. As for the angelfish, they look like they’re in heaven.

I am on a nine-day sailing trip aboard or ‘Queen of the Seas’, a traditional Indonesian timber boat that will carry me from Sanur in Bali, east across the Bali Sea and into the Flores Sea, ending at Labuan Bajo,