Boats of Indonesia

This photo album contains just some the photos of the vast range of interesting boats that we are taking while travelling through Indonesia.

Boats are a significant thing in the life of a typical Indonesian villager. It serves as their primary means of transport, and is important for collecting food for the family.

Those boats we have seen have ranged from tiny dugout canoes that are hardly buoyant enough to float an individual to huge multi-deck boats for fishing or for tourists, to floating platforms that become offshore homes for large families.

The typical Indonesian boat is long and narrow. The “ute” of the family is a long boat that in cross-section resembles our dinghy; about 2.4m beam and about 1m freeboard, square sided and often flat-bottomed, about 10m long, and usually equipped with the ubiquitous Yamaha Enduro 15 motors, which easily plane these long flat hulls with many people on board. If they need to carry big loads, the obvious solution is to stick another motor on, and run it as well at times when more power is required.