Tales from topographic oceans

Still no plane has arrived. I wash one pair of pants and one T-shirt daily, patient. For after flying me from Ambon through cockroach hell - a critter-crawling ride sauced by the drip of air-con - the airline has forgotten, lost, or whatever, my bag. I sit now on top of a volcano, Gunung Api, on the rim of a crater, on the island of Bandaneira, perched on the map in the Banda Sea, feeling like the ‘eensiest’ speck on Earth, and can’t imagine how anything, let alone the Calvins and Levis of this world, could ever reach me.