Koepang

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An Imperial Airways route map, circa 1937. Just as Amelia had effectively tracked the Pan American Airways route in the Americas and the Air France route across central Africa, she tracked the Imperial Airways route (the heavy yellow line) from Gwadar to Darwin

For A.E. and Fred Noonan it was a moderately long hop from Bandoeng --- now contemptible due to overfamiliarity --- to Koepang on the island of Timor, 1,115 miles distant by air. They flew it in just under seven hours, their first full day of flying since they’d reached the Netherlands East Indies. 

Koepang was an alternate stop for A.E., chosen because the daylight was beginning to run short by the time they circled the airfield. Navigation hadn’t been a problem --- the two cities lay at opposite ends of a lengthy island chain in the Indonesian archipelago --- but Earhart and Noonan felt an unfamiliar sense of weariness by the time they landed. Both cramped and sore from being rattled around in the compact innards of the Electra, they had been out of the air for too much time and needed to dust off their wings. 

Ordinarily, Amelia would have made Koepang a “gas and go” stop, but she’d been battling headwinds all the way from Bandoeng, and the meteorologist at Koepang predicted they’d only worsen overnight. Since she and Fred needed to find Darwin, Australia in daylight, it made the most sense simply to bunk down in Koepang, and so they --- rather gratefully --- accepted the accommodations their Dutch hosts proferred.

Remote East Timor (the Republic of East Timor) was ripped apart politically for decades, first by anti-colonial separatists and then by insurgents fighting Indonesian domination. It became fully-independent in 2002. Once a Portuguese colony, it is a predominantly Roman Catholic nation

Timor, divided then between the Dutch in the west and the Portuguese in the east and now divided between Indonesia and the Republic of East Timor, is small, elongated, and covered in lush, green, high sawtoothed mountains. In such a place, and on a dark night, it would be far too easy to end the Worldflight far too suddenly. Daybreak would come soon enough.

The Netherlands East Indies was an especially valuable dependency in the early 20^th Century, coveted by the Netherlands and  Japan alike for its vast fossil fuel reserves. Like most Europeans who relocated to the far-distant colonies of their respective nations, the Dutch in Koepang enjoyed a very high standard of living at a very inexpensive cost. Although the menfolk worked (usually in supervisory positions overseeing native employees) the pace of life was slow and relaxed and rather like being on a permanent holiday. Heavy work and housework was done by native men and women. In places like Shanghai and Hong Kong and Singapore European children were frequently wet-nursed by native “amahs” and learned to be fluent in Chinese before they became fluent in English. In the Netherlands East Indies with its three hundred year history as a colony, many ethnic Europeans had never even considered visiting the “mother country” --- but they stayed socially separate from the locals.  The Japanese occupation during World War II and the independence movements thereafter, upended this comfortable world utterly, and forced many native-born Europeans to return “home” to nations they’d never known, and which had been wracked and broken by war