Amahai and the Illusion of Distance: "Why Indonesia Must Return to the Sea"

By RJ Lino, former president director of PT Pelindo II.

More than forty years later, in 2002, I returned to Amahai, a small village on Seram Island where I had spent my childhood. It was a memory of joy, simplicity, and a quiet form of happiness that never truly disappears.

At that time, my father served as a commander in the Mobile Brigade—then known as Mobrig—the frontline force of the Republic of Indonesia in confronting the RMS separatist movement. Amahai was a remote settlement of no more than five hundred people. There was one elementary school, no secondary education, no formal market, and a single church.

People lived from what they grew. Transportation was almost nonexistent. There was one jeep and two small trucks, all owned by the Brimob unit. To reach Ambon, the provincial capital, we traveled by small boat for nearly ten hours. In rough weather, the waves rose two or three times higher than the boat itself.

We lived inside a Brimob compound, surrounded by dense tropical forest. There was no electricity. At night, we relied on kerosene lamps. Every evening, after studying, came the moment we waited for most—my mother’s stories. Each night, a different story. That rhythm of simplicity, imagination, and togetherness shaped something deeper than comfort.

When I returned decades later with my youngest son, Harris, we traveled by speedboat from Tulehu to Amahai. As I stepped onto the pier, something felt different. The sea had changed.

Forty years earlier, it had been crystal clear. Schools of fish swam visibly around the jetty. You did not need bait—just a hook—and within minutes you had enough for a meal. That day, they were gone.

As we drove from the port, I asked the driver to follow my directions—not his. I wanted to test whether what I remembered still existed.

Turn right after the port. Drive straight. Turn left—the school should be there. Continue to the football field. The church will be on the left.

Everything was exactly as I remembered. Even the house where I had lived was still standing. Only one thing had changed: my sense of distance. What once felt vast was now less than a kilometer.

My son looked around and asked, almost in disbelief, “How could you live in a place like this?” I smiled. Because I did not just live there. I thrived there.

We had space. Freedom. Imagination. We ran barefoot, explored the forest, and built our own world.

Then the driver began to speak. He told me that people in Amahai often felt sorry for those living in Jakarta. “They have to queue—for rice, for assistance,” he said. “Their lives must be difficult.”

Here, two men could cut one sago tree and feed two families for three months. Two hours at sea could provide enough fish for a day. Coffee was not bought—it was grown, dried, and brewed. If a young couple needed a house, the community gathered—masohi—and built it in two weeks.

That moment stayed with me, not as nostalgia, but as a question: What kind of life do we truly want? A life of congestion, pollution, and endless competition? Or a life of balance, sufficiency, and community?

But beyond lifestyle, there is a deeper question—one that concerns the nation itself. Do people in places like Amahai feel they are part of Indonesia?

Because what they see on television is not their reality. They see modern cities, infrastructure, consumption, and opportunity—almost all of it concentrated in Java and western Indonesia. Meanwhile, the natural wealth of eastern Indonesia—its fisheries, forests, and minerals—continues to flow outward, often without a proportional return in development.

This imbalance is not merely economic. It is emotional. It is psychological.

And it is dangerous.

A nation is not held together by geography alone. It is held together by a shared sense of fairness. And this is where Indonesia’s fundamental mistake becomes clear.

For decades, we have designed our logistics system as if we were a continental nation. We built roads, expanded highways, and subsidized trucking. We treated land as the primary connector of economic activity.

But Indonesia is not land. Indonesia is sea.

More than 70 percent of this country is water. Yet our logistics system behaves as if the sea were a barrier, not a connector.

The result is structural inefficiency. Indonesia’s logistics costs remain around 23–24 percent of GDP—far higher than Malaysia at around 13 percent, and significantly above advanced economies such as Japan and Europe, where logistics costs are typically around 8–10 percent of GDP.

But the difference is philosophy.

In Japan and across Europe, energy prices—especially fuel—follow their true economic value. There is no broad distortion through subsidy. Logistics systems are forced to adapt, to optimize, and to become reliable by design.

Indonesia has taken a different path. We attempt to compensate for inefficiency by subsidizing fuel—particularly for land transport—creating the illusion of affordability while embedding structural distortion deeper into the system.

In Indonesia, we subsidize movement, while in Japan and Europe, they engineer certainty—and in logistics, certainty is everything. But this is often misunderstood. The problem is not transport cost itself. Shipping rice to eastern Indonesia, for example, may account for only 4–5 percent of the retail price.

The real cost lies elsewhere: in uncertainty. Unreliable schedules, fragmented flows, long dwell times, and disconnected distribution systems all compound inefficiency. In logistics, time is value, and uncertainty multiplies that value into cost.

This is why even small increases in lead time can significantly raise inventory costs—often between 0.5 to 2 percent for every additional day of delay.

This is why disparity persists—not because distance is too far, but because the system is poorly designed.

In 2012, I introduced the concept of Pendulum Nusantara, later known as the Sea Toll. It was never about adding ships. It was about redesigning the system.

A system where large container vessels move in structured, pendulum-like routes across the archipelago. Where ports are not endpoints, but nodes in a continuous flow. Where distribution is supported by feeder systems—especially RoRo vessels connecting smaller islands.

A system where reliability, not distance, becomes the foundation.

If properly implemented, such a system can reduce logistics costs to eastern Indonesia by 20–30 percent. Not by making transport cheaper, but by making it predictable. It reduces inventory costs, stabilizes prices, and enables industries to grow outside Java.

And more importantly, it restores something intangible but essential: a sense of inclusion.

Because when goods arrive on time, when prices are stable, when opportunity becomes visible, people begin to feel connected—not just physically, but emotionally.

Amahai taught me something no model or dataset ever could. Distance is often an illusion. The real distance is not measured in kilometers, but in how we design our systems.

Indonesia does not need to fight its geography. It needs to return to it.

Because we may forget our nature—but our nature never forgets us.

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