Nearby to where we anchored in Bula was a floating restaurant specialising in seafood.

While staying at Bula, we had three meals on board; two grilled fish dinners and an afternoon supper of banana fritters and coffee. Whatever is fresh and available is what is served. On our first night, we were both very hungry, and we each had what we would call a Hussar in Australia, grilled over coconut husk coals, served with fresh salad, rice and chilli salsas. Most enlightening was the discussion in borken English with the proprietor Ali, mostly relying on the aid of Google translate.

Ali calls himself an environmental warrior. His Facebook profile shows many videos of Ali collecting bags of plastic from around the shore at Bula. Ali spends a lot of time and effort both collecting and educating. Plastic waste from Indonesia is a problem in Australis, where the summer monsoons deliver the waste to the northern Australia coast.

It seems that the solution to this problem must belong in Australia; clearly Indonesians are too poor to consider the impact of throwing plastic waste to the environment, but if a proper recycling facility were build in Australia (close to Darwin) then the labour of Indonesians could be used to collect and sort the abundant plastic to supply the facility.