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CAPE TOWN: It looks more like a giant spider than a boat, yet the Borobudur has already sailed more than 8,000 miles, retracing an ancient trading route stretching from Asia to the bulge of Africa.
The strange craft with its muddle of beams and gangly outriggers seems somewhat out of place moored outside Cape Town's opulent Cape Grace Hotel, wedged between the gleaming yachts of millionaires.
The 19-metre-long (57-foot) wooden vessel, based on an 8th century Indonesian design, left Jakarta in August and is on its way to Ghana - seeking to prove that trade links between Africa and southeast Asia were thriving more than 1,000 years ago.
Apart from some modern safety features such as radar, global positioning system and a satellite phone, the boat is an almost flawless replica of a carving on the wall of Java's Borobudur Temple.
Briton Philip Beale, 42, left his job as a fund manager in London two years ago to live out a decades-long dream to test the ancient design, an ambition he has had since visiting the Indonesian temple as a 21-year-old.
"You could say it's been on my to-do list for 20 years," he said, on the quay at the Victoria and Albert Waterfront, one of South Africa's top tourist spots.
The total cost of building the ship and running the expedition is estimated at 200,000 pounds, covered largely through private and corporate sponsorship as well as funding by the Indonesian government.
INDONESIAN INFLUENCE: Beale's expedition aims to prove that Indonesian trade ships could make the 10,000 mile journey around Africa's Cape of Good Hope.
Some people believe the route to be a first millennium trading route that brought spices and silks from the Orient to Madagascar and other African shores in exchange for iron ore, ivory and skins.
One school of thought even suggests early Indonesians may have colonised Madagascar and exerted a strong cultural influence over parts of the continent.
If the early trading route theory could be proved, it would supplant claims that the Chinese were the first foreigners to visit southern Africa, believed to be in the 14th century, about 100 years before the first documented European journeys to the continent.
The boat was built on Kangean Island, north of the Indonesian island of Bali, using tools and materials that would have been available in the 8th Century A.D.-Reuters
