Sorong

The coast around Sorong has been inhabited by Papuan peoples for thousands of years, with the Moi as the customary landowners of the area the city now occupies. For centuries the whole Bird's Head coast lay within the tributary reach of the sultanate of Tidore, which claimed the Papuan shores and drew tribute through local intermediaries, while the Dutch presence remained thin and coastal into the nineteenth century.

The modern city is an oil town. In the 1930s a Dutch-led petroleum company began exploring the Bird's Head, striking oil inland at Klamono, and set up its operations on Doom Island and the mainland opposite, building housing, wharves and workshops where there had been villages. Japanese forces occupied the area during the Second World War, and Allied bombing and the fighting along the coast damaged the installations. After the war the Dutch, who kept western New Guinea until 1962, ran the local administration from Doom.

Oil production shifted and declined, but the port, the airfield and the labour force remained, and Sorong grew into the commercial gateway of the region, taking in migrants from Sulawesi, Maluku and Java as well as Papuans from the interior. Logging, plantation crops, fishing and shipping replaced petroleum as the main earners. From the early 2000s the rise of Raja Ampat tourism gave the city a new role as a transit point, and in 2022, when Papua was divided into more provinces, Sorong became the capital of the new province of Southwest Papua.

Sorong is a meeting point rather than a single culture. The Moi and other Papuan peoples of the Bird's Head hold customary rights over land in and around the city, asserted in negotiations over development and plantations, and their languages, dances and feast traditions continue in the villages close by. Alongside them live long-settled Bugis and Makassarese traders, Butonese and Ambonese families, Javanese transmigrants and Chinese-Indonesian shopkeepers, and the everyday language of the streets is Papuan Malay.

Church life is central for many residents — Protestant, Catholic and Pentecostal congregations all have a strong presence, with choirs, youth groups and long Sunday services — while mosques serve the substantial Muslim community, particularly among migrants from Sulawesi. Christmas and the New Year dominate the calendar, and Ramadan and Eid are marked in the same streets a few months apart. Relations are generally practical and neighbourly, though the balance between Papuans and newcomers is a live issue.

Music is everywhere: church choirs, guitars on verandas in the evening, and the Papuan pop and reggae played from shops and minibuses. Betel nut is chewed widely and sold at market stalls. Visitors are usually greeted with curiosity, and the city's own attitude to them is matter-of-fact, since most people passing through are contractors, officials or divers waiting for a boat rather than tourists staying to look around.

About 286,000 people live in the city of Sorong, the largest in Southwest Papua province and the main hub in the west of the island. It works as a hub: the port handles cargo and passengers for the whole region, the airport connects western Papua to the rest of Indonesia, and wholesalers, hardware shops, fuel depots and shipping agents fill the streets behind the harbour. Government employment grew after the city became a provincial capital, and construction has followed.

Beyond that, the economy runs on fishing and fish processing, logging and timber handling, palm oil from plantations inland, services for the oil and gas industry, and the trade generated by Raja Ampat, from ferry tickets and hotels to boat fuel and supplies. Many households also depend on small-scale selling — market stalls, food carts, motorbike taxis.

Mornings start early, with the markets busy before dawn and the ferries loading soon after; the middle of the day is hot and slow, and the evening brings people out to the waterfront and the food stalls. Housing spreads inland up the hills and along the airport road, with areas of stilt housing over the water at the shoreline. The recurring problems are familiar ones for a fast-growing Papuan city: water supply, drainage and flooding after heavy rain, waste, the cost of imported goods, and disputes over customary land as the city expands.

Sorong eats from the sea. Tuna, skipjack, snapper, grouper, squid and octopus come in daily, and the standard treatments are ikan bakar, grilled whole over coconut husk, and ikan kuah kuning, poached in a broth yellow with turmeric and sharp with lime and lemon basil. Sambal colo-colo, raw chopped chilli, shallot, tomato and lime, is spooned over both. With it comes rice, or papeda, the translucent sago porridge that is the traditional staple of Papua and Maluku, twirled from the pot with sticks and eaten with the broth.

Sago appears in other forms too — baked into hard slabs called sagu lempeng, mixed with coconut into sweet cakes, or sold as flour in the market — and sweet potato, cassava and bananas fill out the Papuan side of the table. The city's migrant kitchens supply the rest: coto and konro soups and grilled fish with dabu-dabu from Sulawesi, Padang food ladled from window displays, Javanese fried rice, noodles and bakso, and Chinese-Indonesian dishes in the older shops near the centre.

Markets sell betel nut, tropical fruit, bundles of greens and fresh sago alongside imported rice and packaged goods, and the price difference between local and shipped food is obvious. Drinks are sweet tea, strong coffee, and fresh coconut; sopi, a palm spirit common in eastern Indonesia, circulates in some communities but is not sold openly. Street stalls in the evening deal in fried snacks, grilled corn, martabak and sweet pancakes.