PASSAGE TO PAPUA: 10 DAYS ACROSS SOUTHEAST ASIA BY SEA
Presented by Tom Rinaldi
January 29, 2021 @ 6:00 pm - 7:30 pm
The Indonesian State Shipping system — Pelni, as it is known to its passengers — is one of the world’s very last operators of passenger liners in the traditional sense. In terms of distance covered and passengers carried, it has no equal among providers of point-to-point waterborne transport today, with a formidable fleet of nearly 30 vessels sailing scheduled routes that last a week or more from end to end. In late 2019, former PONY Branch board member Tom Rinaldi set out to book passage by Pelni from Singapore to Papua, a trip that would cover some 3,000 miles in ten days aboard two vessels. But with the company’s services declining in recent years as low-cost airlines capture an ever-greater share of its traffic, the challenge was to get there before it was too late. In our first program of 2021, Tom offered an introduction to this living vestige of the world’s vanished liner services, and related how he fared getting from there to here.
(Tom Rinaldi photos)