To and on Mbalata beach

From Moni (oh, one last picture of an amazingly tiny and perfect little gecko I met in my bathroom there)...

...I'd arranged to stay at a beach bungalow place that was a 7-hour drive back in the direction of Labuan Bajo. Very fortuitously, the owner of the bungalows was driving home from taking some guests even farther east on the island, so he offered me a ride in exchange for chipping in with gas and we both won. So it was a very comfortable ride through some amazing scenery and villages of Flores Island. But first, he and my Moni host spent an hour trying to fix the seatbelt of the passenger seat, which clearly hadn't been used in more than a decade and which of course couldn't be fixed, and so we just kind of had to knot my seatbelt into place before taking off.

But once we were underway, it was a lovely way to see more of the island.

We stopped at Blue Stone Beach, which had, as billed, lots and lots of blue stones. Also, unfortunately, lots and lots of trash.

Still, in five minutes on the beach I found more multi-colored stones that I could comfortably carry, and certainly more than I was going to be able to take away with me, so I had to content myself with a picture of them.

After a long but lovely day of driving, we reached our destination: Mbalata Beach, on the south coast of Flores.

I stayed for three nights in this great bungalow, the only guest on the property.

Which is exactly what I'd been hoping for--some real solitude and a beach all to myself for multiple daily beach walks. So of COURSE, 300 teenage boys from a local boarding school showed up my first morning there to spend the weekend on the beach swimming and playing soccer. They were very sweet and enthusiastic....

...but since they swarmed me every time I went down to the sand, I had to spend a little more time in my bungalow than I'd planned. It was kind of fun for awhile, though, watching them frolic and enjoy the place so thoroughly.

And there were, other, small beauties to appreciate.

The morning I left, I got to take a very quiet, solitary walk up and down the beach, just as I'd hoped, and that was lovely. And then it was time to catch a ride to my next stop....

Moni / Kelimutu

After the boat trip, I flew from Labuan Bajo further east, to the middle of Flores Island and the muggy coastal town of Ende. From there I got a ride--after waiting in line for a very long time for refueling at a typically mobbed Indonesian gas station...

...to a mountain town called Moni and its most famous resident, Kelimutu Volcano. The windy drive up into the mountains (on what the locals like to call "spaghetti roads," for their endlessly curvy quality) was BEAUTIFUL:

And in Moni, I had a really nice time just walking around taking pictures of life in this particular corner of this diverse country.

And of course, I paid a visit to Kelimutu. I got up at 3:30 am to do so, with the idea of seeing the sun rise over the craters. But unfortunately it was socked in and raining and I saw nothing except the grayness slowly getting to be a lighter gray. I was actually starting to despair of seeing ANYTHING, when finally, after standing in the rain for a couple of hours, the clouds dissipated, and WOW.

Kelimutu--not an extinct volcano, though I'm unclear as to whether it's classified as active or dormant--is famous for its three crater lakes at its summit. And not just because they're three gorgeous crater lakes. It's even more amazing than that. They actually change colors dramatically, and independently from each other. I'm serious. You should google it. There are photos on line, aerial shots, where one of the lakes is red and another is black and another is bright green; it's INCREDIBLE. It's due to fluctuations in the gasses and minerals released by the separate volcanic vents into each of the lakes. They stay the colors they are for weeks or months at a time, and then one day any of them might just start to shift, and then the next day it will be a totally different color. And I read that it looks like someone just poured different buckets of paint into each crater the colors are so vivid. I thought that must be an exaggeration and I was surely going to be disappointed, but really, that's what it looked like.

Maybe you can tell, I am insanely captivated by this.  As you can see, the color of one of the craters (above) was nearly identical to the color of the one next to it (just visible behind the one in the foreground) while I was there. Here's a closer picture of the one that's set back in the first shot:

Here you can see them both, kind of. I was bummed they were the same color, but still, what a GORGEOUS color. I feel like this picture looks like an oil painting rather than a photograph.

The third crater is set a bit away, so we couldn't see it as well, but you can kind of see it tucked into the hillside in this picture, and at that time is was kind of a navy blue, so very different from its cousins.

And the view from the flank of Kelimutu out to sea...sooooooo beautiful.

Komodos!

So, the two reasons that Labuan Bajo, on the west end of Flores Island, has become such a tourism hotspot in Indonesia are (1) world-class diving and (2) nearby Komodo dragons!

I have been diving a few times, and I enjoyed it, but I didn't love it so much that I want to get addicted to such an expensive hobby. So I try to just stick with snorkeling. I am, however, interested in the enormous lizards called Komodo dragons, which exist in the wild only on three little islands of Indonesia, all sandwiched between Flores and neighboring Sumbawa. They're one of the several things in this world that you can ONLY see in Indonesia, which to me make them one of the big reasons for visiting Indonesia. And Labuan Bajo is the main jumping-off point for boat trips to snorkel and see the dragons.

So I signed up for a two-day trip to do just that. And, wow.

Well, I went the super-budget way, and there were definitely no frills. They crammed 13 of us on this little boat (there was an upper deck for us to sleep on that did not even realistically hold us all--they definitely overbooked the trip) and the food was passable but certainly not great.

But the boat was just a means to an end. We motored along through beautiful scenery...

...to the main event: Komodo National Park.

We went to Rinca Island, and before we even got 100 meters from the visitor's center, there were dragons everywhere!

I should share just a couple of things about Komodos, in case you know as little about them as I did. My favorite facts: (1) They eat entire large mammals, like goats, or deer (no joke! both of which live on the little islands where they do), which they "hunt" by lying lazily around in the underbrush, waiting for a doomed animal to wander by whom they will bother to bite only if it gets close enough it practically steps on them. Once the animal has been bitten, though, the Komodo's mouth is so full of vicious, deadly bacteria, that the animal is as good as dead. The Komodo only has to casually follow it around till it croaks and can be eaten. And they eat 'em but good, leaving only the skull, which lead to this ranger-created graveyard of mammal skull leftovers from Komodo meals.

(2) While a female Komodo lays 30-40 eggs once per year and will guard her nest to protect it from predators, generally only 2-3 of the eggs will survive and evolve into being mature dragons, because Komodos are cannibalistic, and the first few dragons to hatch will get their first meals by eating their brothers and sisters before they hatch. Lovely!

They're pretty fascinating creatures, if you're interested in looking up more. We hung out with them for a few hours (the rangers carrying what were basically enormous snake sticks to defend us with, if need be), and then moved on to the spectacular waters and beaches of this island group.

Check out the pink sand of this beach, if you can draw your eyes away from the turquoise waters:

And the inlet at Pedar Island was lovely enough...

...but when you climb the well-developed footpath to the top, you get probably the most famous viewpoint of the region:

The sunrise wasn't too shabby, either.

I mean, seriously:

This is me, no longer as white as the Antarctic snow, and happy:

Labuan Bajo

I FINALLY forced myself to leave the easy comfort of ex-pat life with R & K in Jakarta and head out on my own into another part of Indonesia. In the end, I decided to spend the second half of my Into time on the island of Flores, in the East Nusa Tenggara region of this enormous country. My first stop was the port town and tourist hub of Labuan Bajo.

I stayed in a really basic hostel that was a bit away from the main drag, so was quiet and had a beautiful dining balcony (a phrase that, okay, makes it sound way fancier than it is) with amazing sunset views.

Plus free breakfast included and just as lovely views in the early mornings of all the fishermen getting up and going with their days.

I stayed a couple of days, despite the crazy noise of so many motos on the main drag and the incessant call-outs from tour touts and taxi drivers, because the positive flip-side of it being a touristy town is that Labuan Bajo has some AMAZING cafes and restaurants where I was embarrassingly happy hopping from a green tea latte here to a veggie sushi roll there to a ginger-tumeric-lemon-honey juice (a local concoction called "jamu" that is my new favorite thing) at the next place to falafel salad at another.

Oh, my lord. And all while using the ubiquitous free wifi to catch up on weeks worth of emails and other computer tasks and chatting with friends in other places. Heaven.

And in the quieter gaps between motos rushing by and the umpteenth guy asking if you want to book a liveaboard SCUBA trip, the town really is lovely.

Still, there's a reason all the tourists come here and it's not the food or the town itself. So, more on that next post....

Uoleva / Newfound

I've been remiss in sending out the link to a piece of travel writing I recently had published in an online literary journal (based in Austin) called Newfound. It's about my experience on an island I visited in Tonga two years ago after I finished my year at South Pole. I did a post about that island, Uoleva, at the time, and you can see that post here.

And then here's the link to what I wrote about it.

I'm assuming that when the next issue comes out, this link will no longer work, but if that's the case when you try it, you should still be able to find it if you just Google Newfound + my name.

Thanks for reading!

Borneo!!!

For me, even just the word "Borneo" sounds so exotic and remote that it seemed strange and impossible to me, when R and K suggested it as a weekend trip we could take together, that such a thing was even possible. But when you're in Jakarta, it's possible. So off we flew to Kalimantan (the Indonesian part of the island of Borneo), and headed straight to the riverside town of Kumai. These huge concrete buildings are actually bird factories of sorts--they house little swifter birds, which are birds that make nests out of their own saliva, and these nests are then used to make a soup that is considered a delicacy in China. Seriously, look up "bird's nest soup." I had no idea. But there are thousands if not millions of tiny, very loud swifter flying all over the place in Southern Borneo towns because of all these concrete buildings where they raise them. Crazy.

From Kumai, the three of us boarded a river boat looking roughly (well, okay, less fancy than but still kind of) like this:

...and happily settled in to start our three-day river trip into Tanjung Puting National Park.

For three days and two nights we slept and ate and talked and played cards on the boat, with big chunks of time devoted to scanning the riverbanks for wildlife and just appreciating the steamy jungle beauty of Borneo, and the subtly changing flora around us as we got deeper into different parts of the park.

The food was so yummy...

But the primary reason for the trip was to see orangutans, which exist in the wild on only two islands in the world: Borneo, and neighboring Sumatra. It was an INCREDIBLE experience to get so close to these amazing primates.

As you can tell from how close that picture actually is, most of the orangutans we saw were only semi-wild; they are used to humans because they visit one or more of three daily feeding stations set up in the park. When they feel like it they come to feed; when they are finding plenty of food elsewhere in the park, sometimes they keep their distance. In the meantime, the feedings help to support growing populations of this highly endangered animal, and the revenue brought in by tourists who come to observe the orangutans at the feeding stations helps keep them protected.

The orangutan above was an adolescent who was already out on his own in the forest. This guy is a beast of a dominant male that the local guides have named "King." And he sure acted like it.

We also saw several mothers with their babies. Orangutans have a gestational period similar to humans, but once they have a baby, it stays with mom for up to EIGHT YEARS before going off on its own, during which time mom will not be receptive to mating. So there is a huge investment in each mature orangutan's life, and the poaching of babies as pet or for sale to zoos is completely devastating to the frighteningly small population of them left on earth.

While the orangutans were definitely the stars of the show, we saw all kinds of other cool stuff like glowing mushrooms, proboscis monkeys, a carnivorous pitcher plant (ironic since I'd just seen these at the Sydney Botanical Gardens and now I was seeing them in the wild)...

...and even a Bornean Short Python crossing the path we were walking on to one of the orangutan feeding sessions!

After three hot, muggy, buggy, blissful days on the river, we got one final night in an air-conditioned hotel in the Bornean town/city of Pangkalanbuun, which had this awesomely colorful river boardwalk area.

Plus there was a palace there, and so many other amazing sights and experiences, the call to prayer echoing through the streets multiple times/day, and so much more...but this was already a lot of pictures. So I'll let you go now till the next post, from a totally different part of Indonesia.