More than one guidebook compares Savu to the Garden of Eden for once, the guidebooks are right. The island of Flores lines the north side, and at its south-pointing apex is tiny Savu itself, an isolated mote all but passed over by the changes that have swept Southeast Asia for the past thousand years. At the center of the islands, and the cruise, sits a roughly triangular basin of water 400 miles across called the Savu Sea. The sea is the farthest reach of a 15-day cruise of Indonesia's Lesser Sunda Islands that begins in Bali and ventures eastward to fishing villages, snorkeling stops, native markets and the lizard-infested island of Komodo. Once the haven of Malay pirates who raided the spice cargo of the Bandas, the Savu Sea is today most easily reached by cruise-ship passengers aboard the Island Explorer, a small 36-passenger motorized catamaran operated by Spice Island Cruises of Jakarta. It was not until some 30 years later that I found one body of water distant enough, yet bold and rich beyond my jaded dreams, to earn its place in the pantheon of exploration: One of the seven must be the Savu Sea. But then there were many more, Bering Sea and Barents, obscure places with names like incantations on the blue orb. There was the Mediterranean, and the mysterious Sargasso the inscrutable East China and the current-circled Caribbean. When I was a boy, I used to spin the globe in search of the Seven Seas.
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