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Thai long-tail boat, Phang Nga Bay

The Indian Ocean is a whole new area for us.  When we originally started this voyage, it was supposed to end (after about 2 years) in Australia, so Christopher and Amanda could finish high-school in a "normal" school.  Now that we've decided to finish the circumnavigation, we realize that we need to expand the website again.

When we first contemplated continuing our cruising after Australia, we knew that the big choice would be which way to go around Africa from Thailand.  We could take the northern route and sail up the Red Sea, through the Mediterranean and into the Atlantic, or we could take the southern route across the southern Indian Ocean, down to South Africa and into the Atlantic around the bottom of Africa.

The southern route made sense for several reasons.  Jon's family hails from greater southern Africa and it's always appealing to travel where we have friends and/or family.  Although the route around South Africa takes us well out of the tropics, it does allow us to stay many more months in the warm seas that we love so much, exploring rarely visited places such as the Maldives, Chagos Archipelago, Seychelles and Madagascar.  Capetown, at 34°S, is actually much warmer than the Mediterranean - southern Spain's at 37°N and southern France is at 43°N.  The southern route is less expensive in that many months can be spend in places where your can live off the sea or trade clothing for fish and fruits like we have done in the small islands of the South Pacific.  The Mediterranean, with its marinas and upscale lifestyle is expensive.  Finally, while neither route is completely safe, the northern route goes past some known pirate trouble-spots.  The southern route is somewhat longer, but that just means that we have longer to explore the places we visit.

We entered the Indian Ocean from the east, somewhere above Australia in Indonesian waters.  Our journey has taken us across this map from right to left.

Click on any a marked area of the map to go directly to that country's main Landfalls page.

Fishing boat off the coast of Flores, Indonesia

The Indian Ocean has such a variety of cultures and landscapes, it is really fascinating.  We traveled from the dry volcanic islands of Indonesia, up the mangrove and forest-lined Straits of Malacca and Malaysia, to the rugged limestone cliff-lined bays of Thailand.  From there we sailed west across the Andaman Sea to lush, tropical Sri Lanka, then south to the low, dry atolls of the Maldives and Chagos, and finally on westwards towards the granitic islands of Seychelles!

The Indian Ocean is unlike the Pacific in that it's bi-directional.  In the South Pacific it's difficult to go east, as the trades always blow from the southeast.  If you just have to go east, most sailors go south of the trades and play with the edge of the Roaring Forties (which blow from the southwest).  But this invites cold winds and nasty conditions - they call them the Roaring Forties for very good reasons.  The Atlantic has a similar situation - to go east, the easiest way is to go far enough north or south to get out of the easterly tropical tradewinds, and this is how sailors have been returning to Europe from the "New World" for hundreds of years.

Malaysian fishing boat in Strait of Malacca

But the Indian Ocean is different.  In the North Indian Ocean the winds blow from the northeast from about November to March and then they switch around to blow from the southwest.  These are called the Northeast and Southwest Monsoons, and have nothing to do with cyclones or storms as some people think.  The word "monsoon" comes from the Arabic mawsim meaning "fixed season".

In the South Indian Ocean the SE Trades predominate between 5-25° South most of the year, particularly between April and November.  But from December to March there is a period when the winds come from the northwest - the NW Monsoon.  This is caused by the strong Northeast Monsoon in the North Indian Ocean bending the winds in the South Indian Ocean.  The NW Monsoon blows sporadically in the South Indian from the equator to about 12-15° South for those few months.

Sri Lankan outrigger fishing boat

All this switching of wind direction means that if you choose your seasons you can sail back and forth across the Indian Ocean with the wind at your back and never leave the tropics.  In fact, we've met several boats that do just that - they've been cruising just the Indian Ocean, sometimes for over 10 years, visiting SE Asia (Indonesia, Singapore, Malaysia, Thailand), India, Sri Lanka, the Maldives, Chagos, the Seychelles, Mauritius, Madagascar, Mayotte, and the east coast of Africa (mostly Mozambique, Tanzania and Kenya).  If 10 years sounds long, remember that we cruised just the Caribbean, a much smaller body of water, from 1981 to 1988.  Time often doesn't mean very much to a cruiser.  It's one of the joys of cruising.

Ocelot in the Indian Ocean:  We entered the Indian Ocean somewhere in Indonesia, although there is no specific point at which the Pacific ends and the Indian begins.  We crossed the Equator twice while sailing in the Indian Ocean, once going north as we left Indonesia heading for SE Asia, and then again going south from Sri Lanka to the southern Maldives.

Up | Indonesia | Singapore | Malaysia | Thailand | Sri Lanka | Maldives

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