Flores
After a week relaxing amid the rice terraces and hippies of Bali, Summer and I flew to Flores. Unlike Bali, Flores has never been a major tourist destination. I had booked the only hotel in the town of Labuan Bajo that could offer us hot water, and that hotel had eight rooms.
We’ve avoided flying on this trip as much as possible, but it would have taken four days to get to Flores by sea. And flying with the famously unreliable Merpati Airlines (unofficial slogan: "It’s Merpati and we’ll fly if we want to") was not routine jet travel.
As our little Fokker twin-prop banked and groaned and screamed over Lombok, Komodo, Rinca, and dozens of smaller islands, we had our first clear view of the Indonesian archipelago. It was one of those rare cloudless days when the land below looks exactly like it does in an atlas, bright patches of green surrounded by blue. The volcanic hills, lit from the side by the afternoon sun, looked like the little triangles that mapmakers once drew to suggest mountains.
And here be monsters. On Rinca, an hour by boat from Flores, we got to see Komodo dragons in the wild. (They are named for the island of Komodo, further to the west, but they live on Rinca too.) This one was a little over two meters long, old and sluggish. But they are typically three meters long, can run at 20 km/h, and if they bite you their viscous drool contains bacteria that will surely kill you, saving them the effort.
Here were hobbits too, once. The cave where scientists found the remains of homo floriensis is three hours’ drive from Labuan Bajo.
Indonesia probably contains many more wonders like these. Flores itself is remote and wild and unexplored, and half the size of Belgium. In West Papua earlier this year scientists reported finding a ‘lost world‘, an area of forest where it seems likely that no human had ever been before. A few previously unknown species of animals just walked up to them, out of curiosity.
The waters around Indonesia boast the greatest diversity of life on earth - a quarter of the world’s known species of fish live here. We spent several days diving off Flores with Ernest Lewandowski and his wife Kath Mitchinson, who have been running a dive shop there for almost 15 years.
Ernest is a soft-spoken Scot who spent many years as a commercial diver, repairing oil rigs in the North Sea. That meant working in freezing cold water, breathing a mixture of helium and oxygen, and taking two days to descend and a week to surface. For some reason he prefers living on a tropical island, studying nudibranchs, and teaching people to dive.
I am a Special Needs diver, and he did some remedial work with me. He told me that my kicks were too short and quick, when they should be long and slow.
Actually what he said was: "Lad, lad, ye’ve got to quit yer faerie dancing."
The dive sites we’d visited around Koh Tao were crowded, and the sheer number of people in the water drive the fish away. Cruising around the islands off Flores we could go a whole day without seeing another boat. Bottlenose dolphins swam alongside us, and we saw manta rays and turtles feeding at the surface. Underwater we saw crocodile and scorpion fish; humphead parrotfish; great schools of fusiliers; and in the distance, watching us watching it, a white-tipped reef shark. Candy-striped shrimp reached out to clean our nails, and Ernest’s beloved nudibranchs did whatever nudibranchs do. For me the highlight was sitting on the ocean floor, peeking around a wall of coral, and watching a meter-long puffer fish doing something that I can only describe as chewing the cud.
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At the little airport on Flores, as we prepared to leave Indonesia, Summer was puzzled by a poster asking for the public’s help in identifying the Bali bombers. She said that the photofit pictures of their faces looked distorted. I realized that they were photos of the bombers’ actual heads. They were decapitated when their backpacks blew up, and their expressions were frozen in pain. Not enough pain. The people of Bali and Flores and all of Indonesia deserve better than this.