From exploring the charming Kota Ambon, the main town of the island, to walking up mountains through lush tropical vegetation, there are many undiscovered gems ready for visitors to experience. The name refers to both the beauty of the people here and the beauty of the tropical island location. As one of the earliest places in Indonesia to be occupied by colonial powers, Ambon has a rich and ancient history. Many of the Ambonese today have mixed European and Ambonese heritage.
Get Around. To get around in the downtown Ambon try a becak, a carriage attached to a bicycle. The most prominent structure on this coast is Benteng Amsterdam, an impressive walled fort built by the Dutch East India Company in the midth century. The three-storey blockhouse features metre-thick walls, massive beams, wooden floors and shuttered windows with views of Hila beach and Seram Island beyond.
The fort is deserted when we arrive and we take our time to explore, gaze at the dazzling blue sea and puzzle over some bizarre marine sketches — including one of a mermaid — from Renard's Book of Fantastical Fish originally published in , some of which were painted by a Dutch artist stationed at the fort.
Garuda Airlines flies to Ambon. The town is also a stopover between Tual in the Kei Islands and Jakarta. See garuda-indonesia. Book direct with a driver or at the tourist kiosks in the airport. Home Destinations. Search Site. Previous slide Next slide. Seeing Tasmania's wild east coast by boat an exceptional experience Contains:. Nine must-do highlights of Naples, Italy Contains:.
These migrants are overwhelmingly Muslim, and they dominate small-scale retail trading and transportation networks. Tension between Muslims and Christians in Maluku province had been growing for decades, the result of the declining influence of traditional authority mechanisms; the influx of migrants; and the "greening" or perceived Islamicization of the central government in Jakarta.
The outbreaks of communal violence elsewhere in Indonesia in the aftermath of President Soeharto's resignation in May served to heighten distrust between the two communities. Both the pela alliance system and the authority of traditional local leaders, called raja, had been undermined long before the current conflict erupted.
The pela system had received a fatal blow at the time of Indonesian independence in , when a largely Christian political elite, many with military or administrative ties to the Dutch colonial administration, opted to establish the Republic of the South Moluccas RMS , rather than join the new Indonesian state. A brief war ensued which the RMS lost in December In the course of the conflict, many Muslim villages were razed by RMS forces, and the destruction was not forgotten.
In addition to the war, a steady influx of migrants from other parts of Indonesia resulted in the establishment of new settlements that were completely outside the pela system, which applied only to Ambonese Christians and Muslims.
In , with the passage of a new law on local government, local leadership was gradually transformed from a clan-based system, represented by the Ambonese raja, to a territorially based system of village heads, the lowest rung on the Indonesian administrative ladder. In one sense, the new system was more egalitarian, because it opened up the possibility that migrant communities of ethnic Bugis, Butonese, and Makassarese could be represented, and some candidates for village head appealed to these communities for votes.
On the other hand, it meant that many of the village heads lacked the authority the old raja had enjoyed, and when conflict broke out, there were fewer people at a local level with the ability to stop it. The migrant influx also tipped the demographic balance in favor of Muslims. Migrants from Sulawesi had been coming to trade in Ambon since the sixteenth century, but migration picked up sharply in the s, and with it, increasing tension with the Ambonese population.
Their political rise coincided with what Ambonese Christians saw as an affirmative action policy undertaken by the national government in the early s to redress the marginalization of Muslim entrepreneurs in comparison to their ethnic Chinese competitors.
Whatever the rationale for this policy in Muslim majority areas, in Ambon it created anger and frustration among Christians, as they saw not just economic opportunities but also civil service jobs going more and more to Muslims, many of them migrants.
As Christians were eased out of the positions they had traditionally held in the local government, teaching profession, and police, theyturned to the private sector, only to find that migrant groups from Sulawesi, among others, had sewn up the market. Christians began to feel that their political, economic, and cultural existence in Ambon was threatened.
Communal relations, then, were not good, even before the violence erupted, and everyone we talked to in Ambon spoke of regularly recurring fights between Muslim and Christian kampungs. The neighborhoods seemed to live in a state of barely repressed hostility, but the frequent fights were quickly settled. The atmosphere, however, changed perceptibly for the worse after a series of possibly provoked communal incidents broke out elsewhere in Indonesia in late On November 22, , a dispute between local gangs over a gambling establishment, at which Christian Ambonese acted as security guards, turned into a communal riot as rumors spread that the Ambonese had destroyed a local mosque, and Muslims youths trucked into the area then burned some two dozen churches.
On November 30, a Christian youth congress in Kupang, West Timor, held a congress, followed by a march, to protest the church-burnings. In the middle of the march, a truckload of youths appeared whom no one seemed to know, and in no time an ethnic Bugis neighborhood, including the mosque, was burned to the ground. Both incidents were widely believed to have been provoked by the military, because the army in particular was perceived to be the beneficiary of civil unrest: a traumatized population might see the army, rather than a democratically elected government as Indonesia might have next June, as the only guarantor of security.
It costs Rp Note that Damri buses do not operate all the time, so make sure to check the schedule before heading to the airport. The schedule from the airport to the city is at 7 a. Going the other way, buses from the city center Lapangan Merdeka to the airport run at 4.
Taxis are also available from the airport. A taxi will cost around Rp One interesting thing about moving around the city is that you can take ferry from one point to another point and it is actually faster than driving.
There are numbers of hotels around the city ranging from budget to more expensive hotels in the city. You can find a number of nice mid-range hotels around Ambon City. There are a lot of interesting things to do in Ambon City for tourists. Top of the list of course is taking a spice tour to learn about the history of spice cultivation around Ambon. Here are a few of the other things to do around the city. Natsepa Beach is just short drive from Ambon City.
In the afternoon the beach is alwaus packed with locals swimming or strolling around. Hunimua Beach or known as Liang Beach is around 40 kms from Ambon. The beach is beautiful. Keep an eye out for kids jumping from the Bridge into the crystal clear waters. You can find some other beautiful beaches in Ambon and around Indonesia in this post.
People living in Ambon still trade in the traditional way, at a market.
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