Following the Trans-Flores Highway: A road trip, not for the faint of heart or weak of stomach

After a good ten days exploring Bali (but in truth, barely scratching the surface of what the island has to offer), I took a cab to the airport, to fly to Maumere, a town in Eastern Flores. Flores is a large island, on the eastern part of the Indonesian archipelago. It is an island visited by relatively few tourists, particularly in low season, and is indescribably beautiful, populated by volcanoes that seem to rise directly out of the turquoise sea. The island is dotted with a handful of towns to visit, spread reasonably far apart: a perfect place for a road trip.

Day 1: Denpasar, Bali - Maumere, Flores

I arrived at the airport early, having shared a cab with a hostelmate whose flight was two hours before mine. When I checked the screens to find the check in desk for my flight, it appeared to be missing. Figuring it just wasn't posted yet, I sat down to wait, unworried. As the clock ticked, however, I noticed that flights later than mine were listed, but mine still wasn't shown. I walked around the small terminal, looking for a sign that might point out the airline, but saw nothing referring to Sriwijaya Air (say that five times fast). Finally, I asked a couple of guards, and they pointed out the Nok Air flight to Ende (different flight number, different airline, different destination) and told me to check in at the counter listed for that flight. Somewhat skeptically, I did so, and was handed a Nok Air ticket to Ende. I protested that I was going to Maumere, but the guy at the desk just nodded and waved me on my way.

Waiting at the gate, I realized I was the only Westerner (in fact, the only tourist, as far as I could tell). On the plane, the flight attendant didn't even speak English. This was hardly a problem, as my Bahasa is good enough for necessary communication, and I have been on a plane before and was able to successfully put my seatback and tray table into an upright position, and the Indonesian woman beside me was able to let the flight attendant know that the fluid leaking onto our heads from the overhead bins was an issue. Still, it was strange to be on a flight where the attendant didn't speak any English - I generally take English-speaking on planes for granted.

The flight was only about two hours, and when we landed in Maumere, we walked across the tarmac to a one-room airport (the doors of the toilet didn't even close). As I waited for my luggage at the only luggage belt, I was approached by a gentleman from the "Tourist Information Office" (read: a small wooden desk, manned by one person, carrying a notebook). As I signed my name, I discovered that I was the only tourist to have arrived in the past two days (I later met and travelled with the two people who'd signed just before me). Luggage in hand, I located a taxi and asked to be taken to the hotel I'd planned to stay at. Chatting through my Flores plans with the driver, I told him I was heading to Moni the following day. He said, "There's nothing in Maumere. You should take the bus to Moni today." As I'd read similar things about Maumere, and I had a deadline to get to Western Flores, I decided to do so, and asked him to take me to the bus station. On our way, we passed a bus parked on the side of the road, so we stopped there and I got on, suddenly headed for Moni.

Day 1.5: Maumere - Moni

Waterfall at Moni

Loading the bus

Once I was settled into the bus, it took us a while to get a move on. First, we drove around and around the town, picking up various people. Then, we went to a tire shop, and loaded as many tires as could possibly fit into and on top of the bus. I had a seat to myself for a while, until an older woman boarded somewhere along the way. The road wound up through the mountains, making me just a tiny bit sick, but the views were fantastic. As we drove west along Flores' spine, we passed green rice fields, towering volcanoes, and small rivers trickling down the mountainside. As we got higher into the mountains, the sea was sometimes visible in the distance. We had a bit of rain, but it passed quickly, and then the fog and clouds made the entire view even more surreal. When we reached Moni, I jumped out just across the street from one of the town's guesthouses. I checked in, then sat down in the adjoining cafe to have something to drink and get my bearings. Two French travelers (who became some of my traveling companions for the next week) told me that there was a waterfall just a five minute walk away, so I decided to head out and see it. As I walked along the main (actually, the only) road of Moni, it struck me as a very strange place. One of Flores' most famous tourist attractions is the Kelimutu volcanic crater, which lies just a motorbike ride away from Moni. Here is a town that receives most of Flores' tourists, and yet the town is tiny, with small wooden and bamboo houses, not to different from those in Ampangan Woh. Everyone in town seems to work in the tourism industry and nothing else: running guesthouses and homestays, working in cafes that cater to foreigners, and offering motorbikes or drivers up to the crater. The waterfall was pretty small, but it was a very peaceful place: down a little path from the road it seems completely disconnected with the hustle and bustle (okay, there is no hustle and bustle in Moni) above. It sits in what feels very much like the jungle, and to access it, one must cross a bamboo bridge, where the bamboo logs bend and roll under one's feet. I returned to the hotel, where I spent the evening with the other guests and the very friendly owners, then went to sleep early, to prepare for a sunrise walk the following morning.

Near the Moni waterfall

Day 2: Kelimutu and Moni - Bajawa

Sun trying to come out from behind the clouds

I was picked up by a motorbike driver at 4 am, and we drove up to the crater together. It was foggy, unfortunately, so we were pretty confident we wouldn't have a good sunrise (so far, I haven't been good about my volcano sunrises: Mt. Batur was cloudy too), but we started the walk up from the car park anyway. In the dark, even with the fog, the stars were fantastic, and the moon was a perfect crescent. The walk up was a series of stone stairs of annoyingly unequal heights and widths: some of them required two steps, some I could skip entirely, and if I hadn't been watching, I would have certainly tripped several times. We reached the viewpoint for the first of Kelimutu's three famed lakes, but in the dark the color was more like mud than dazzling, so we moved on quickly, to the summit to await the sunrise. A handful of other people had already gathered there, but not many (only about a dozen). As the sky lightened, we could see how cloudy it was: the clouds were drifting so fast that the pale blue and orange beginning to color the sky drifted in and out of sight). The sun rose behind the fog, as we'd predicted, but the clouds eventually lifted and cleared for long enough that we could see the incredible green lake.  Even without the sun shining directly on it, it was a deep, deep turquoise, and was especially mesmerizing when compared with the red-brown lake just behind it. The third, blue, lake was on the other side of the summit, also beautiful, but not as bright as its green cousin. Once the fog returned, we made our way back down to the hostel, this time appreciating the scenery we'd missed in the darkness on our way up.

Blue lake, with red lake behind

I love the clouds here 

Finally some sun

Along the road back to Moni

Flores landscape

I packed up, and sat in the cafe having breakfast while I waited for my bus to my next destination, seven hours west: Bajawa. I knew there were four other people going: the French girls I'd met the day before, and two Dutch guys (whose names had been just above mine in the book at the "Maumere Airport Tourist Office"). When it became apparent that for whatever reason, the 10:00 bus was not going to show up, at least not in time to make it through the road block down the road which opened only from noon until 1:00 pm, the five of us decided to organize a private car (for the same price, when divided by five, as the public bus). We took a non-air-conditioned minibus for the first two hours, and then switched to a very nice van. Again, the road made me a little sick, and I was glad to get off when the time came, but the ride was even more stunning than the day before. We drove more or less along the coastline, and the volcanoes rising above it were perfect cones, almost too perfect to be real. On top of that, the water of the sea to the south of Flores is an incredible clear turquoise: there were times that I could see the stones on the bottom from the car on the cliff above. When we stopped for gas, it became clear that we were way out of tourist country: the girls at the shop across the road giggled and hid when they saw us, and the people at the gas station were eager to meet us and find out where we were from. Arriving in Bajawa, the five of us decided to stay together, so we checked into a hotel recommended by the guys in Moni. We wandered to the restaurant next door for dinner, and spent the evening there, having a grand time and reveling in how nice it was not to be surrounded by tourists (but I was glad to have found travel buddies for this leg). The only other Westerner we encountered approached us: he was working for the magazine of one of the Indonesian airlines, and writing a piece about Flores tourism; he asked to interview us as we were the first tourists he'd met so far on his trip. We all felt very good about that.

Day 3: Bajawa

Not a bad view to wake up to

Bena village, volcano in the distance

The five of us had a nice morning, enjoying the hotel's lovely breakfast and fantastic balcony views, overlooking rice fields, valleys, and villages below, with the omnipresent misty volcanoes towering above everything. Once we'd all eaten, we rented 3 motorbikes and headed out to explore Bajawa's surroundings. We drove down into the valley, to visit some of the villages there. The road down was a beautiful drive through the jungle: bamboo and coconut trees on all sides, with the volcanoes appearing in clear patches now and then. There was hardly anyone else on the road, and it was incredibly peaceful (particularly as I didn't have to drive and could just enjoy the scenery). We came to the small village of Luba, where a woman waiting at the road invited us in. The twenty or so houses were arranged around a central courtyard, where several graves were laying, free to be trampled on or visited (many homes in Flores, even in the more modern towns, had graves nearby or even in the front yard. This struck me as extremely odd, but in the end, I like the idea of having deceased loved ones always close to home). The woman and the other members of the village didn't speak English, but I was able to use my Bahasa to chat with them about the village. Huge piles of drying corn kernels lay on tarps out in the sun. We turned our bikes next toward Bema, the more well-known village in the area, and certainly the one with the most spectacular view. This one, too, had a central courtyard, though it was raised on higher land, with the houses in a kind of ditch on all sides of it. Walking around there, we met a few people from Indonesian universities doing research about the peoples of Flores and tourism there. We walked up to the end of the courtyard, where a path of stone steps led to a lovely little hut with an amazing view of the valley, the volcano, and the sea to the south. It was hard to see where the ocean met the sky. We stayed there for a while, taking in the view, before continuing our drive to the hot springs. Other than two local guys already there, we had the place to ourselves. The steamy water made even the path beside it too hot for comfort, but the spring ran into a cold river, and it was possible to locate and take advantage of the spot where the cold and hot water mixed into a perfect temperature. We had lunch at the little rest stop there (a single hut, where we were served rice, vegetables, and fish on the floor (identical to many an Ampangan Woh meal). After lunch, we headed north, past a fabulous viewpoint, back through Bajawa Town, and halfway up Wawo Muda, one of the volcanoes. We decided to turn back before reaching the summit though, as the road was not meant for bikes, and it was getting too late anyway. We agreed to make the trek the following morning before heading to our next destination.

At the hot springs

View from the road

Day 4: Gunung Wawo Muda and Bajawa - Ruteng

View from sunrise hike to Wawo Muda

Fog settling in the Wawo Muda crater

We got up early the following morning and were out the door at 5:30 - we had to return the bikes at 10:00. We drove to the foot of the volcano (where the road turned into a walking path) and started up. The trail was steep, but the view incredible: the sky was already pink behind Flores' other volcanoes, and the valley was just starting to lighten. When we reached the crater, I had to just stop and stare. A layer of clouds had settled inside of it, and a small farm was just visible through them. Behind the crater, on the other side of the mountain, the other two volcanoes were visible, rising in the distance. At some point, the trail turned into a narrow path through the woods, which didn't seem right, as I expected to be heading around the crater. In fact, it wasn't right: we ended up wandering into a little farm, where a little girl spotted us and started screaming for her father, shouting that tourists had arrived. He came out and laughed. "Wawo Muda?" he asked. "Wrong way." By the time we got back up to the place where we had erred, it was too late to go the right way, and we had to start back down. The crater was worth it, though, even if we didn't make it to the actual viewpoint. Our own was more than good enough.

View from Wawo Muda

Back at the hostel we had breakfast, then packed up and climbed into a van to head to Ruteng, a four hour drive west. The driver was a bit of a lunatic, at least as it seemed to me from the back seat. He was going way too fast on the tiny and curvy mountain roads, flying around the plentiful hairpin turns and into the wrong lane, honking each time we approached one to warn anyone who might have the audacity to be coming from the other direction. At one point, we passed a truck, honked, stopped, and reversed back to meet it. The two drivers chatted (clearly they were friends, each wondering where the other was headed), then the truck driver passed our driver a doughnut and we sped off again. It started to rain: the windshield fogged so much that the driver rolled down his window and leaned out of it to see in front of us, but still he hardly slowed down. I was relieved when we reached Ruteng, but the pouring rain meant we wouldn't see much that day. We rested a bit, then spent the evening in the hotel restaurant (terrible food, worse service, but a beautiful view of rice paddies and mountains). Once the rain had stopped, a couple of us headed out for a walk to see what was around. We almost instantly attracted a gaggle of children, wondering what we were doing and where we were going. They followed us until they lost interest, but were soon replaced by other curious Ruteng residents. The sunset was beautiful - pink clouds over the valley and hiding the mountains - but it got dark quickly. We returned to the restaurant, where we spent the night playing cards and waiting for our food.

Sunset over Ruteng

Day 5: Ruteng - Labuan Bajo

Fog over the village of Ruteng

Although we'd planned to spend the day exploring the surroundings of Ruteng - there are a handful of sights to see and places to visit - we woke up to more terrible weather, which showed no signs of letting up. We therefore decided to just hang out for the morning and then go into town for lunch. "Town" turned out not to be much of one, and as it was pouring, we didn't feel like walking around at all. Instead, we settled in a little restaurant, where we ate decent local food, and then played more cards (after repeatedly assuring the owner that we weren't gambling, which, he told us meekly, is illegal) until it was time to head out. We were all feeling more than ready to get out of Ruteng, and head to Labuan Bajo - the western-most point of Flores. It was another four hour drive, but at least this driver seemed more concerned with his speed and not careening of the cliffs along which he was driving. He did, however, play a terrible CD on repeat for the entire trip.  The landscape was still beautiful mountains and rice paddies, but the poor weather followed us the entire way, and definitely detracted from the view. As we got near the harbor town, though, we came to a lookout over it all, and it was breathtaking - a huge port, where so many boats were docked. There were many cafes and guesthouses perched on the side of the mountain, as ours was (meaning a lot of stairs to climb, particularly after the days of diving that would follow, but spectacular sunrise and sunset views from our front porch). We pulled up to our hotel, thanked the driver, and our road trip across the island was officially complete.

Flores was fabulous to drive across: the mountains, the sea, and the small towns were just incredible to stare at for hours on end, even after five days. The island offers wonderful volcano hikes and beaches, and is one of Indonesia's less-touched places to visit. It was a great way to escape the craziness of Bali, and dig a bit deeper into the country. People there (hotel staff, restaurant staff, strangers on the street) were unbelievably friendly and helpful, and seemed genuinely curious about us, and thrilled to share their home with us. It would have been a lonely five days, however, without the company of the four people I was fortunate to meet in Moni. I'm so glad we happened to coordinate our time on the island, and had the chance to share together the majesty of Flores.