Mireille Day

And then came a little rowing boat with three men in it, an older man, a younger man and a middle-aged man.

And we thought, if they're pirates, we don't care.

You know, we were so tired.

We were exhausted.

We were too exhausted to care.

But they seemed quite friendly.

And we ended up going ashore with them to their huts.

If they had ever seen...

non-Indonesians before.

It hadn't been very frequently because the women were putting their arm up against ours and comparing the colour, you know, dark and light.

Our very short hair, because we'd all cut our hair really short because it was hard to wash.

We only had seawater to wash it in.

So all of us had, you know, short cropped hair like convicts.

And they looked at the hair and one woman undid her bun and her, you know, black hair cascaded right down her back.

And we decided then that we would exchange some of our goods for food.

So they came back to the boat laden with food, pans of bananas, pineapple, a live chicken, which was amazing.

Some eggs.

And so they just came onto the boat as if it was, you know, a sale.

It was like a shopping mall and the doors had just opened for a sale and started grabbing everything, things that we needed to continue the voyage.

So we were trying to hide things like cameras and clocks and echo sounders.