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.