The flight to Denpasar is over before I know it. My plan to take the first taxi whose driver doesn’t try to shout me down fizzles when EVERY taxi driver [and some guys just standing around, no taxi anywhere in sight] get a load of the Big White Walking Dollar Sign and bombard me with a hundred “friendly” offers. I wade through the mess and set out on foot.
Even though Alexandros warned me about the hike from the airport to the nearest hotels, etc. by the time I reach signs of civilization (and a string of eerily silent hotels whose attendants on duty glance up from their televisions long enough to wave me away. "Full!") I am both extremely hot and severely bothered.
In frustrating times like this, there’s something truly satisfying about stalking Indonesian streets at night with a surly expression and a big bottle of Bintang. Consuming alcohol in public might be less of an affront to Balinese culture than Javanese, but it still feels really good.
When You Visit Denpasar: Be sure to check out the fumes welling up from the cracked sidewalk. Their odor specialists have succeeded in blending the unmistakable stench of human feces with the unforgettable reek of sulfur. The results may surprise you!
Buildings on the main drag range from “semi-nice” to “crumbling”. [“Jesus, Denpasar...! At least Jogja had a major earthquake three years ago. What’s your excuse?”] I eventually find a cheap(ish) hotel for the night. The room is shabby, but the bed is comfortable and I prepare to wake up early, catch the local bus back to the airport, and book my flight to Labuanbajo.
The bed is too comfortable. And I fail to reset my [cell phone’s] clock to reflect the one-hour Java/Bali time difference. I sleep late.
I arrive to the airport at 10:20. The only flight(s) to Labuanbajo left at 10:00. Tomorrow’s flights are full. The next direct flight to Labuanbajo leaves in three days. Faced with the prospect of two more nights in this ugly pile, I promptly buy a ticket to Mataram. [I think: “Lombok is a step in the right direction!”]
In Mataram I learn that today’s Labuanbajo flights left in the morning, tomorrow’s are all either canceled or full, and the next direct flight is in three days. At this point a smarter man might take the hint, see a few days of Lombok, and take the ‘in three days’ flight. Instead, I investigate My Other Options for getting there:
Flying is out. A boat will take far too long. They haven’t perfected amphibious train technology here yet, which just leaves The Bus. Travel time to get across Lombok, take a ferry to Sumbawa, and get across Sumbawa is about 12 hours, I am told. From there it’s one more ferry to Labuanbajo (on Flores), where one must charter a boat to Komodo and Rinca. It sounds simple enough. I book it.
While the hotel room in Mataram is comfortable I can’t quite call it “clean”. Shortly after entering the room I detect the sound of tiny claws on the ultra-thin “wood” of the ceiling directly above the head/pillow area of the bed. Scritch-scritch-scritch. Scritch-scritch-scritch-scritch. Further exhausted by the imagined ordeal of asking for another room, I check for possible points of entry –there are none, unless the rat wants to drop seven feet onto my face– and resolve to sleep with headphones on. The headphones become an even bigger necessity when I learn that the noise is NOT in fact a nest of tropical rats. Turns out it’s a new litter of mewling kittens!
The excitement of sleeping in a real bed [even if it is a lumpy hotel bed] continues. In the morning, as I’m checking out, I try and explain to the guy behind the desk about the kittens. My halting Indonesian is insufficient, so we walk back and I show him the sound. He regards me blankly. It’s strange to me, but he finds a nest of kittens scratching the ceiling and crying all night utterly unremarkable, unworthy of even a perfunctory shrug.
Mataram is a great city for signs. Not only do I spy a license plate that reads DR ROCK, but also a motorcycle repair shop called CAT OVEN and a restaurant advertised only by plain signs that read “SEA FOOD AROMA”.
We board the bus late in the afternoon. Lombok flies by and I chat with James and Hanna, a couple of nice British kids touring Asia. Soon we’re all huddled under jackets against the harsh air conditioning, desperately trying to sleep. 15 hours later, we stumble groggily out into the port at Sape. Rows of big trucks line the parking lot. The truck stop warung does not look promising.
It had been suggested to us that we would arrive at Sape around 7:00 AM and would board the 8:00 AM ferry to Labuanbajo. Our first clue that the tour company may not have given us ALL the details of the journey comes when the guy overseeing the bus ride collects our tickets and the bus disappears. Unsure how to proceed, I ask some of the old men with faces like wadded-up lunch meat selling overpriced water and snacks about the 8:00 ferry. They chuckle to one another. No, they tell me, the only ferry comes at 5:00 PM.
At this point it starts to look like the tour company in Mataram completely fucked us*. [WHY did I have to sleep for that extra hour in Bali??] I have never wanted a Round Table Pizza as much as I do right now. *Turns out they didn't. Oops!
The sun has reached full intensity by the time I venture out to explore the dusty main drag leading to the ferry stop, a depressing little slab of small-town Hell. I knew this kind of place must exist outside of movies but I never expected to find it in this part of the world. This photograph makes this place look about 1,000 times cooler than it actually is:
I mistakenly wander into a cool, clean warung and sit down at a table before realizing this place is the social nerve center for the town. The other patrons crowd around me to make their introductions and ask the same handful of questions that every Indonesian asks as a matter of course (Name, Rank, Country Of Origin, Marital Status, etc.). In a surreal moment, a group of local teachers enter in matching tracksuits to get a celebratory juice after a successful sporting event. [Later I will regret not asking what sport gets played so early on a Sunday morning. Or, I would regret it if I cared.] I drink my Coke and beat a hasty retreat.
Accounts vary, but I have either seven or eight hours more to wait until the ferry arrives. Somewhere in there I scrawl in my notes: “Best thank your God I’m not armed, folks. This town would look great with the bodies of every human I’ve seen here strewn across its streets.”
Nearly 2:00 PM. Three hours to go, approaching ‘crunch time’. I need to silence the incredulous part of my brain that keeps asking if the ferry ride could possibly REALLY take 8 hours. “Have you learned nothing on this trip?” I scoff at it, “Of course it could!” [Spoiler alert: The ferry ride doesn’t take 8 hours. It takes 8½!]
The Labuanbajo ferry arrives at 6:00 PM and finally departs a little before 8:00 PM. On the ferry I meet British Steve, an amiable bloke given to sneering terrible jokes. [My personal favorite was one I’d heard before. Q: “How long does it take for an English woman to have an orgasm?” A: “WHO FUCKING CARES?” A charming man.] I manage to sleep for about 30 minutes at a time folded around my backpack on the bench seat, when not staring blearily at the Indo HBO playing on the TV. While The Next Karate Kid is still an absolute turd, I’m pleased to report that Michael Ironsides chews more than enough scenery to make up for teenage Hillary Swank’s truculent horse-face.
Except for the ferry and the mosques, Labuanbajo seems to be asleep when we roll in at about 4:30 AM on May 4th. [For anyone keeping track of days, the answer is YES. All the bus action only got me there about 4 more hours than just waiting for the next flight would have. You shut up now!] James and Hanna hop another bus and I wander the streets with British Steve. We roust some hotel employees and get a room to grab a few more hours of sleep.
Labuanbajo is oriented like any coastal tourism town, with one main drag running parallel to the ocean. But there are many boats and the horizon is filled with distant islands. The people don’t hustle me for anything on sight. This place makes good on everything I imagined I would find in a country made up of 17,000 islands.
I walk around and make some inquiries about booking a boat to Komodo or Rinca (smaller island, closer than Komodo Island, also part of the park). I shy away from the package group tours and book a one-day trip to Rinca.
Later in the day British Steve and I have some lengthy conversations about world affairs over meals of tasty seafood (like the slab of tuna pictured above). As usual in chats like this, I listen politely while he pontificates and interject my two cents when called upon. Steve has some interesting theories about the human race – he’s traveling around the world to find a good place to ride out the impending apocalypse! He’s also fond of referring to people as representatives of their nation’s government. (“When you lot went into Iraq…”) I bristle at this. Is it a uniquely ‘liberal American’ thing to feel disconnected from (and to avoid association with) the actions of one’s government? “Hang on, man. The United States government is just as much a ‘they’ to me as it is to you!”
In the morning I bid British Steve farewell (he is traversing Flores by motorcycle) and walk to the docks to meet Hut and [Hut's brother, whose name I forget to write down], my boat chauffeurs.
Their boat is slow, so the ride to Rinca takes around 2½ hours. This is fine, though, because our route takes us through a dreamlike stretch of water with anonymous islands on all side; green, mysterious, seemingly uninhabited. It’s an incredibly peaceful time, save for the twinges of fierce loneliness. [I silently promise never to travel alone again, especially to a place like this.] However, I have enough time to weigh all the factors carefully and my ultimate decision is that the boat ride would be improved for everyone (in the world) if we spent it slurping red wine + Limeade and blasting some Lil Wayne.
The terrain is mostly easy, running through bright forests, rocky riverbeds, and grassy hills. After the first few times Sulyman warns me about the huge patches of water buffalo shit in the path I automatically revert to my normal hiking posture, head mostly down, picking my steps along the path. So I almost run into Sulyman’s back when he stops abruptly and whispers: “Dragon!” Caught off guard I jerk my head left, right, all around until I see it. There is a Komodo dragon standing in the middle of the path, about 25 feet directly in front of us. The goddamn thing’s well over five feet long and I probably would have stepped on it before I realized what it was. We watch as it ambles into the underbrush and I take some awestruck pictures:
This is the first of three dragons we see. Shortly after this, noise from the boisterous French ladies behind us drifts through the forest to us. In a rare show of Indonesian disgust, Sulyman shakes his head. “They are stupid people”, he says. “They talk so loud! The animals hear it, they go away!” We pick up the pace until they’re out of earshot.
The second dragon is laying low in the shade of a tree to cool down. It is person-sized. When we get close it shoots us a slit-eyed look of what I choose to interpret as disdain, as if we would be totally uninteresting to kill.
We hike on. The valleys are all monkeys and buffalo watering holes:
The last dragon we see is laid out at the edge of the forest, near the end of the hiking path. Sulyman identifies her as female and estimates that her swollen belly probably contains an entire deer. She breathes slowly and raises her head about once a minute to heave a great sigh. Each time she does this it appears as if she is trying to stand, calling out in the mushmouthed Augustus Gloomp voice we used to use to characterize Ben’s cat Jeff: “Oh, I would kill you good if I -oof- wasn’t so full of -oomph- bacon grease and chocolate!”
The next day I assume that it will be easy to charter another boat to one of the other islands in the neighborhood. No dice! Everyone wants more notice and no one wants to leave the same day. No worries, though, Labuanbajo is a fine place to bum around in for one more day. I watch the boats, eat more tasty fish, plan the rest of the week, and generally collect my thoughts… [This last point is a bit frustrating since I’ve had about 8 MONTHS to collect my thoughts. Trust me, my thoughts have never been more fully collected. I itch for action.] Still, it's hard to complain about sights like this:
I learn two interesting things about the hotel on my last day in Labuanbajo. First, all the construction noise we’ve been hearing is actually demolition noise. A crew of four guys is collapsing the brick walls at the back of the hotel with sledgehammers, sledging the knocked-down wall into pieces, and tossing the debris into a pit behind them. During my stay they have removed a skeletal staircase (leading to an already-demolished second story). Now they’ve worked their way back through Room #9… #8… and from the shower in Room #6 it sounds as if they’ve already breached #7. I’m getting out of here none too soon. I made it this far without getting killed! To get clocked in the head by flying bricks while crouched over one of Hotel Mutiara’s horrid toilets would be a disappointing fate. WHICH REMINDS ME…
A Note To The Proprietors of Hotel Mutiara (Labuanbajo, Flores - Indonesia)
On behalf of all Westerners, let me say: the traditional Indo squat toilet is fine. We can take it. And the standard Western toilet one sits on? Fine too, of course! The body of a Western-style toilet with no tank and no seat that one must awkwardly half-squat, half-stand over to use, where one must cross their fingers the first time because one has never been required to aim like this before? Yeah, you might want to look into replacing those. Westerners can handle the Indo toilet, no need to try and "meet us halfway" there. Halfway is worse.
ANYWAY... The other thing I learn is that the tiny creature I’ve seen scuttle into the drain hole every time I open the bathroom door is not -as I had assumed- a frog or -as I had feared- a rat. It is, in fact, a slimy black crab.
Up next: The final week. Darmasiswa closing ceremony in Jakarta, goodbyes, conclusions, etc.
All posted weeks after the fact! Also, there's a new mix posted here.
