We signed ourselves up for a multi-day boat voyage from Lombok to Flores, with stops in Komodo, Sumbaya and the occasional desert island along the way as our post-diving adventure. The trip started not long after sunrise with a boat back to Lombok, a walk to the bus station, then bus to Sengiggi, the bustling capital of Lombok where we joined with the other twenty odd travellers we would be sharing quarters with on our thirty food wooden boat. Mostly Dutch, mostly young, and thankfully mostly not a boatloa of drunken Australian and British backpackers. We'd actually expected mostly Aussies here in Indo, but mostly it's been 90 % Dutch. Funny how westerners tend to travel to their old colonies- Cambodia, Vietnam, Laos and Morocco are positively lousy with French, while India was crawling with Brits, and Cuba was full of Spaniards, and here in Indonesia, this part anyway, it's all friendly, perfect English speaking Dutch folk. No matter... We started our trip with an extended visit to the Mataram mall, which, if you've ever wondered what an Indonesian shopping mall is like, wonder no more. All I can say is it was like every other developing world mall I've been to- blue glass and all, except that smell of rotten milk pervaded the whole thing, even from the parking lot. It took us a while before we realized that was the Durian fruit for sale inside the mall. No interesting stories from there though, except for the one gigantic beetle that flew out of my pocket when I reached in to grab money to buy peanuts.
Onward to the requisite stop at the "traditional authentic genuine indigenous craft village," where the Sasak people, descendants of Burmese sailors from centuries past, made ceramics from the volcanic clay of Lombok. (Exit through the traditional indigenous authentic gift shop...) we crossed Lombok, skirting volcanoes and rice paddies, stopping briefly to watch boatbuilders at work before boarding our own vessel. A lovely stop and snorkel (where the current nearly carried us away!) at a New Yorker cartoon style tiny palm tree desert island, where we also enjoyed a barbecue, campfire songs and 60s hippie guitar singalong classics as sung by our Indonesian guides, and headed back to the boat beneath the incredibly dark sky, crystal clear southen hemisphere constellations and the streak of the milky way above.
Thanks to our friend Mira, we opted out of a cabin and slept on deck. This was a great fresh air option until the waves started crashing over us around midnight, and our companions on deck fled for the main room belowdecks filled it up, and chaos ensued as foreigners of all languages scrambled for decent spots as the waves crashed overboard, the wind swept away bedsheets, and the boat pit hex and yawed in the pitch black of night. One netherlander was tossed by a lurch into the mast, and was screaming and crying. Chaos ensued. Somehow we made our way to the rear deck where we found a dryish spot to 'sleep' until sunrise, my childhood fantasies of sleeping on boat decks, stoked by one too many fantasy novels, brought to an end by a firm reality check.
The next day was a few more small island stops, as we chugged past Sumbawa, a small-by-Indonesia-standards island that was probably the length of New York state. Toward evening we stopped at a small village there, and wNdered ashore to meet villagers unaccustomed to white faces. In this weird postmodern world however, we all kind of awkwardly stared at each other, the white folks mostly too ashamed with their white liberal guilt to photograph the native types, while the indigent indigenous silently stared and smoked while filming us on their cell phone cameras. Did not however, get a chance to see this infamous indonesian kid: We wandered around past their elevated bamboo huts, past goats and by cows so skinny I actually thought they were deer, as some of the Dutch played soccer with the kids to the sound of the evening call to prayer. Though Indonesia is not especially devout and is in fact quite liberal in Interpretation of Islam, a few women covered their heads with scarves and men wore sarongs and Muslim caps, though the Religion is apparently quite intertwined with animist beliefs, spirit worship and goat sacrifice.
That nights rest was far better than our first- we managed to secure ourselves a cozy corner of the rear deck as we sailed onward to The Island of Komodo. Sunrise woke us of course, as we made our way through smaller scattered islands, these drier and more strangely featured than the first islands. We arrived in Komodo harbor, plunked down our camera fees and tromped through the brush in search of the infamous dragons. Two hours of hiking in the dry heat, a multi-day boat voyage and twenty odd hour flight to see the great poop of the infamous Komodo dragon. Dejectedly, we returned to the gift shop cafe and sipped coffee, only to encounter a few roaming beasts seeking scraps behind the kitchen. They really are crazy creatures, basically like landbound alligators, with forked tongues and apparently feast on the local deer, monkey and chicken population (though no humans since an unfortunate Swiss tourist went missing, and all that was found were his sunglasses. The beasts eat the bones of their prey.)
Got our few photos and were back to the boat via dinghy, (which the crew kept referring to as the "dingey"), with a brief stop at the inappropriately named "red sand beach"'and then into Labuanbajo, Flores's main harbor, by nightfall. Thankfully, we found a place to stay and a flight home four days later, which allowed us to escape more boat time. We settled in at the Bajo Komodo Eco Lodge a short ways out of town, and relished the first hot showers we'd had in well over a week.
Boat/ark, sinking reality...
Onward to the requisite stop at the "traditional authentic genuine indigenous craft village," where the Sasak people, descendants of Burmese sailors from centuries past, made ceramics from the volcanic clay of Lombok. (Exit through the traditional indigenous authentic gift shop...) we crossed Lombok, skirting volcanoes and rice paddies, stopping briefly to watch boatbuilders at work before boarding our own vessel. A lovely stop and snorkel (where the current nearly carried us away!) at a New Yorker cartoon style tiny palm tree desert island, where we also enjoyed a barbecue, campfire songs and 60s hippie guitar singalong classics as sung by our Indonesian guides, and headed back to the boat beneath the incredibly dark sky, crystal clear southen hemisphere constellations and the streak of the milky way above.
Thanks to our friend Mira, we opted out of a cabin and slept on deck. This was a great fresh air option until the waves started crashing over us around midnight, and our companions on deck fled for the main room belowdecks filled it up, and chaos ensued as foreigners of all languages scrambled for decent spots as the waves crashed overboard, the wind swept away bedsheets, and the boat pit hex and yawed in the pitch black of night. One netherlander was tossed by a lurch into the mast, and was screaming and crying. Chaos ensued. Somehow we made our way to the rear deck where we found a dryish spot to 'sleep' until sunrise, my childhood fantasies of sleeping on boat decks, stoked by one too many fantasy novels, brought to an end by a firm reality check.
The next day was a few more small island stops, as we chugged past Sumbawa, a small-by-Indonesia-standards island that was probably the length of New York state. Toward evening we stopped at a small village there, and wNdered ashore to meet villagers unaccustomed to white faces. In this weird postmodern world however, we all kind of awkwardly stared at each other, the white folks mostly too ashamed with their white liberal guilt to photograph the native types, while the indigent indigenous silently stared and smoked while filming us on their cell phone cameras. Did not however, get a chance to see this infamous indonesian kid: We wandered around past their elevated bamboo huts, past goats and by cows so skinny I actually thought they were deer, as some of the Dutch played soccer with the kids to the sound of the evening call to prayer. Though Indonesia is not especially devout and is in fact quite liberal in Interpretation of Islam, a few women covered their heads with scarves and men wore sarongs and Muslim caps, though the Religion is apparently quite intertwined with animist beliefs, spirit worship and goat sacrifice.
That nights rest was far better than our first- we managed to secure ourselves a cozy corner of the rear deck as we sailed onward to The Island of Komodo. Sunrise woke us of course, as we made our way through smaller scattered islands, these drier and more strangely featured than the first islands. We arrived in Komodo harbor, plunked down our camera fees and tromped through the brush in search of the infamous dragons. Two hours of hiking in the dry heat, a multi-day boat voyage and twenty odd hour flight to see the great poop of the infamous Komodo dragon. Dejectedly, we returned to the gift shop cafe and sipped coffee, only to encounter a few roaming beasts seeking scraps behind the kitchen. They really are crazy creatures, basically like landbound alligators, with forked tongues and apparently feast on the local deer, monkey and chicken population (though no humans since an unfortunate Swiss tourist went missing, and all that was found were his sunglasses. The beasts eat the bones of their prey.)
Got our few photos and were back to the boat via dinghy, (which the crew kept referring to as the "dingey"), with a brief stop at the inappropriately named "red sand beach"'and then into Labuanbajo, Flores's main harbor, by nightfall. Thankfully, we found a place to stay and a flight home four days later, which allowed us to escape more boat time. We settled in at the Bajo Komodo Eco Lodge a short ways out of town, and relished the first hot showers we'd had in well over a week.
Boat/ark, sinking reality...
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