All day, the water has been as smooth as glass. Occasionally I've seen lonely clouds move by overhead and small green islands appear in the hazy distance. Otherwise the landscape has been featureless, a clean slate of blue sky and sea. I've been sailing on the Banda Sea for the past three days from the city of Makassar aboard the Ciremai, a large passenger liner, bound for Indonesia's Banda Islands, a 23-square-mile archipelago of nine dots of land in the Moluccas (formerly called the Spice Islands). Though sparsely populated and remote—Java, Indonesia's main island, is some 1,000 miles to the west—the Banda Islands figure prominently in history. For at least 1,500 years, traders and fortune seekers from as far away as China and Arabia and, later, Europe journeyed there for native Bandanese nutmeg and mace—commodities that were once nearly as precious as gold—and wrote romantic accounts of the archipelago's turquoise waters, white-sand beaches, and spice-laden jungles.

I first heard about Banda in 1982. (The entire archipelago is colloquially known as Banda; the word means port in Indonesian. Banda Aceh, devastated in the 2004 tsunami, is a city on the distant Indonesian island of Sumatra.) At the time, I was a college student in San Francisco, eager to see the rest of the world. By chance, I befriended Tanya Alwi, an Indonesian classmate from a powerful Bandanese Muslim family of nutmeg and pearl traders. Perhaps sensing my wanderlust, Tanya invited me to stay with her and her family during summer break at their home in Jakarta, Indonesia's capital city, on Java. During my visit, Tanya and her father, Des, a businessman widely known as "the raja of Banda", captivated me with tales about Banda's history and its physical beauty. They also introduced me to its deliciously hot-sweet-sour-spicy cuisine. The curries, stir-fries, and grilled dishes that I ate, all lavishly seasoned with nutmeg, cloves, and cassia, were like no other Indonesian foods I'd known. Although I traveled extensively throughout the country on that trip (and many subsequent ones) and always intended to visit Banda, I never made it. Years later, I'm finally getting my chance.

From the deck of the Ciremai, in the orange glow of twilight, most of Banda finally comes into view. I pull a map out of my back pocket for reference. Up ahead I spot Banda Besar, "Big Banda", with a craggy spine of mountains running down its center. To my right is cone-shaped Gunung Api, an active volcano that looks like Mount Fuji in miniature. To my left lies Neira Island, the location of Banda's largest settlement, Bandaneira, my destination.

As the ship pulls in to the town's small dock, I see a large crowd of people down below. All of Bandaneira's approximately 6,000 residents, it seems, have come to greet the Ciremai. I grab my suitcase and am heaved along with everyone else exiting toward the narrow gangway. Once on land, I feel someone tugging at my bag.

"Mr. James!" says a tall man in a bright red shirt. "I am Abdul Kadir! Welcome to my home!" Kadir explains that he is the manager of Banda's sole hotel, the 25-room Maulana Inn, where I'll be staying. When I ask him how he's recognized me, he laughs: "Mr. James, you are the only white man for a thousand miles!"

The next morning I awake to the sound of laughter and the sweet aroma of garlic being cooked. I throw on some clothes and venture downstairs to the Maulana's brightly lit kitchen. Inside, six women are seated around a table, at which they are variously bruising and pulverizing the spices and aromatics (called bumbu-bumbu in Indonesian, as well as in the Bandanese dialect) to be used in that day's lunch. "Selamat pagi [Good morning]," says one of the women in a singsong voice. She introduces herself: her name is Aca (pronounced AH-cha) Magrib, and she, along with Siti Mohammad and Ajeng Hamzah, are the hotel's main cooks. I ask whether I may watch them work.

"Of course you can—just no snacking," says Magrib in Bahasa Indonesia, a language I picked up on my visits to the country. She hands me a glass of teh halia, a room-temperature breakfast beverage made of ginger, cloves, cinnamon, and palm sugar. As I sip my drink, which is intensely spicy and sweet and reminds me of pumpkin pie, Hamzah tells me of the local specialties they're about to prepare. First, there's ikan bumbu rujak, a dish the Alwis introduced me to: tuna (Banda's staple protein) braised in kecap manis (Indonesian sweet soy sauce) and tamarind extract and seasoned with ginger, galangal, chiles, lemongrass, cassia, cloves, and cracked whole nutmeg (which infuses the dish with its sultry flavor but isn't intended to be eaten). Then there's sasatay, which is, as Mohammad describes it, a sort of tuna-based take on falafel, made with toasted ground cumin, fresh mint, poached tuna, and kenari, a variety of local almond. Nasi kuning, a fragrant, turmeric yellow coconut rice, completes the menu.

I'm curious about the kenari, and Mohammad offers me one to sample. It tastes exactly like the skinless blanched almonds I know from the States—that is, sweet and somewhat earthy. "Kenari is what keeps our nutmeg trees growing," she says. "They're tall trees, as big as your buildings in New York, and they were planted to protect the nutmeg from the sun. Nutmeg trees don't like to get hot."

About an hour and a half later, the dishes are ready. Since no one is staying at the hotel except me, I invite the staff to join me for lunch on the patio. With the sound of the Banda Sea lapping at the shore just a few feet away, we eat.