Esperanza

Our podcast has skipped a month, but then with the Rainbow Warrior gracing our shores things have been a tad busy around here of late. As you may know, she was here in October as part of the international Quit Coal tour, and we went to meet some of the Greenpeace supporters who came to have a look round during the open boat days.

Also on our radar was the recent Indonesia tour undertaken by that other Greenpeace ship, the Esperanza. I was lucky enough to be there and while the crew were busy painting and blockading palm oil tankers in Sumatra, I was able to talk to them about what it's like being in the middle of a major piece of direct action.

And you'll have to excuse my froggy throat in the introduction, there's a cold going around the office.

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The hoses are turned on a climber, attached to the anchor chain of the Gran Couva. © Greenpeace/Novis

The Esperanza in Indonesia

The small (wet) figure above is a crew member of the Greenpeace ship Esperanza. Darkness has fallen on the port of Dumai (Indonesia) since this photograph was taken several hours ago, but our climber is still there, in the dark, occupying the anchor chain and preventing the tanker from setting off to the Netherlands with its 27,000 tonne cargo of palm oil. As Jamie wrote on the Forests for Climate blog, it takes only one person to stop a giant palm oil tanker.

As the Rainbow Warrior sweeps into town, here on the other side of the planet the Esperanza is sailing through the warm waters of the old Spice Islands. We left Manokwari on Monday and are currently en route to Jakarta, slipping past bewitchingly exotic names such as the Ceram Sea, Buru Island, the Halmahera Sea, Selat Sagewin, the Banda Sea... I could go on.

If you're trying to place these exotic names, you could do worse than download the Google Earth layer which is tracking the progress of the Esperanza through Indonesia (you'll need to install Google Earth first, of course, but there's a plain map version below). I'll be posting highlights from the tour there, and it will update automatically so check it often for the latest stories, videos and other titbits from our expedition.

Oh, and we saw whales yesterday.

Jayapura (image by sandranahdar, licensed under Creative Commons Attribution 2.0)

As I write this, I'm sat in a hotel lobby looking out on to a market place where women are sat on the hard tarmac, blankets with tomatoes, lemongrass, onions and chillies spread out before them. Towering behind them is the incongruous bulk of the local KFC and, although there was torrential rain an hour ago, the streets are bone dry. That's because it's very very hot which is not surprising when you're a few degrees south of the equator.