Word: sulawesi
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...masted wooden schooner, for a four-day cruise. It was the middle of the night, and the Marco Polo cruised along at a steady seven knots, the low hum of its engine blending with the soft slap of waves against the hull. Engel watched the dim, forested hills of Sulawesi slip behind us and into the night. "Untouched," he said. "Nobody knows about these places...
...Long distinguished for its unique cultures and endemic wildlife, Sulawesi is also the home of old-fashioned Bugis sailing vessels like the Marco Polo. These are still built by hand in the style favored by Sulawesi's traditional seafaring folk in the southern port town of Bira. The Bugis have always been traders, filling the cavernous holds of their schooners with timber from Borneo to exchange for spices in the Moluccas. The Marco Polo, however, is designed to carry passengers, with seven simple bunks, a shower and a shaded gazebo on the upper deck...
...were heading for the sparsely inhabited island of Selayar, 75 kilometers south of the southernmost tip of Sulawesi. The trip takes about eight hours, and by midnight, most of the dozen passengers were already asleep in their bunks, rocked by the gentle motion of the waves. Haji, the 68-year-old, one-eyed captain, was up in the darkened bridge, sitting cross-legged on a stool to the right of the wheel, making constant and almost imperceptible adjustments to the course of the ship. Navigational instruments?radar, sonar and GPS?glowed faintly on the control panel, but Haji paid them...
...terror has not been vigorously fought on every front. Take, for example, the mysterious case of Parlindungan Siregar. According to an Indonesian intelligence report obtained by TIME, he was a senior instructor at an al-Qaeda training camp 10 km outside Poso, on the island of Sulawesi. The document gives a detailed breakdown of the location and staffing of the camp: Arabic was the working language; new arrivals were issued pistols and Kalashnikov automatic rifles and then asked to show their commitment to jihad by joining in the island's bloody Muslim-Christian clashes. Indonesia's most senior civilian intelligence...
...fear of a backlash from Indonesian Islamic groups has her government whipsawing in its treatment of terror suspects. Megawati's dilemma may explain why, despite the testimony of its own intelligence, the government couldn't even bring itself to admit the existence of an al-Qaeda terrorist camp in Sulawesi, and still allows one of its leaders, a man connected with Osama bin Laden's terrorist network, to remain at large. On the one occasion recently when law-enforcement authorities did hand over a suspected al-Qaeda operative to the U.S., local sensitivities obliged them to disguise it?clumsily...