World Voyage 2026 · Leg 1
Leg 1: from Bali to Réunion across the Indian Ocean
| Route | Bali, Indonesia → Réunion, France |
|---|---|
| Dates | 1 May 2026, 1 August 2026 |
| Duration | 92 days |
| Distance | 4,078 nm |
| Spots | AVAILABLE |
Leg 1 is the deep breath before Neptun commits to the Indian Ocean. Ninety-two days, 4,078 nautical miles, six landfalls spread across a blue crescent that arcs from the Sunda Sea to the Mascarenes. It begins in Bali at the end of the dry-season trades, with the ship loaded, the crew still learning each other’s rhythms, and the scent of frangipani and clove smoke drifting down to the pier at Benoa. Within a week you are threading the Lesser Sundas toward Komodo, a landscape so dry and prehistoric it feels like sailing into the Pliocene, with monitor lizards longer than the ship’s dinghy padding across pink-sand beaches.
From Komodo onward the passages lengthen and the world empties out. The sixteen-day run south to Cocos (Keeling) is Neptun’s first real taste of blue-water rhythm: watch on, watch off, flying fish on the cabin top at dawn, the Southern Cross climbing higher every evening. Cocos itself is a 27-island atoll ringed by coral and drying laundry, a place the HMS Beagle visited in 1836 and Darwin used to sketch his theory of coral-reef formation. Then comes the long one: nearly 2,000 nm of southeast trades across an empty ocean to Rodrigues, 24 days of heeling reaches, phosphorescent wakes, and the steady creak of rigging settling into its sea-legs.
Rodrigues arrives like a secret. A tiny creole outpost 350 nm east of Mauritius, still speaking kreol rodrige, still running on octopus markets and lagoon fisheries. Mauritius, the next stop, is louder, richer, an island built from sugar and spice where Tamil temples, Chinese pagodas, and French colonial verandas crowd the same hillside. And Réunion, four days further on, is the first piece of the European Union the voyage will touch: a volcanic cone rising 3,000 m out of the Indian Ocean, with vanilla plantations on one flank and an active volcano on the other.
This is the leg where Neptun finds her voyage-rhythm. The ship learns her crew and the crew learns the ship. By Réunion, muscle memory has replaced checklists, the cook knows who takes sugar in their coffee, and the sextant comes out not because the GPS has failed but because star-sights at dawn have simply become something you do. It is the opening chapter, and it sets the tempo for every leg that follows.
