ABSTRACT
In the early 1960s, National Geographic magazine commissioned a series of articles from a California couple exploring the roadways and waterways of Asia on Tortuga II, an amphibious jeep purchased from a WW II surplus depot. The couple’s first installment recounts their floating and driving adventures on and along the Ganges, where Tortuga would sometimes carry them “to venerable cities and princely palaces” and other times serve as their “campsite in the countryside, where the only wealth was in the stars.” 1 Their next installment, published in May 1961, chronicles the couple’s travels through Indonesia. As the article’s subtitle heralds, this leg of their Tortuga adventure transpires in a “young and troubled island nation”: Their essay opens dramatically, with their arrival in the capital city of Jakarta, a little over a decade after Indonesia’s independence from the Netherlands:
Djakarta’s traffic swarmed around us: I made my turn with more than usual caution. Crack! A rifle flashed close by, and a cordon of soldiers materialized. In minutes we stood in the office of an army commandant. “But all I did was make a wrong turn, ” I protested. “ Your sentry could have blown his whistle—he didn’t have to shoot!”
The commandant smiled in apology.
“Forgive us,” he said, “but Indonesia is in a state of emergency. Even here in the capital, one sometimes shoots first and asks later.” 2
