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| Dusk at Labuan Bajo |
After five days on the road, I was excited to reach Labuan
Bajo, the Western port in Flores, and the gateway to the famous (and rightly
so) Komodo National Park. Labuan Bajo was my reason for being in Flores in the
first place: a close friend had suggested meeting up there (for the first time
in over a year, when she came to visit me for a quick weekend in Kuala Lumpur)
for some spectacular diving. We met at the hotel in the evening when I arrived
from Ruteng, and then walked out to the dock for dinner. We ate at one of a
series of food stalls right on the harbor, where fresh fish and squid (the
day’s work of the many fishermen working out of Labuan Bajo) was waiting on
ice. I let Yuli pick out who we wanted to eat and we ended up with a delicious
plate of grilled snapper and grilled squid, barely seasoned, but delicious
nonetheless, and a big plate of rice and veggies, accompanied by an incredibly
spicy sambal sauce. One of the best meals I’ve had in Indonesia. We went back
to the room for an early night: we had a big day ahead of us.
The following day, our first day of diving, we were
accompanied in the boat by my four Flores travel buddies, whom I’d talked into
joining us for a day on the water. One of them would be diving, two snorkeling,
and the other just along for the ride, and the hiking we’d do in the afternoon.
The boat ride alone was fantastic: Komodo National Park includes 29 islands and
an incredibly blue sea between them. The islands themselves are lush and
uninhabited (by people).
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| Water so clear you can see the bottom from the boat |
For our second dive, we were told that we would “hopefully”
see a manta ray or two, but that we shouldn’t get our hopes up. Mantas are my
favorites to see under the water, so my hopes were way, way up! Within five
minutes, we spotted one, and they just kept coming after that, so that for most
of the dive we were just hovering or even kneeling in the sand, watching the
mantas swoop over our heads, paying absolutely no attention to the odd
land-dwellers ogling them in awe. They were enormous, and just everywhere, so
that as we were watching one, two or three more sneaked along behind us. We
also saw a massive school of smaller (but still beautiful and graceful)
cownosed rays – one of the divemasters told us later that he’d never spotted
one before. He also told us that generally, diving in that spot, they consider
themselves lucky to see even one manta, whereas we saw, probably, upwards of
twenty. We also watched a turtle rise in the middle of a group of rays, but he
was hardly the main attraction (in my opinion). It was a fantastic final dive
of the day, and we got back on the boat ecstatic once our hour was up (how
annoying is the need to refill tanks).
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| Dragons |
After an unusually good lunch (for a dive boat), we stowed
our equipment for the day and headed onto dry land. We’d docked at Rinca
Island, the site of the Komodo dragon trek. Although we were warned, once
again, that Mother Nature is fickle, and there was a chance we wouldn’t see
anything, we spotted a baby dragon right away.
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| I thought he'd be bigger... |
Not too long after, we stumbled across a group of dragons
napping. According to our guide, they only eat about once a month, so there’s a
lot of down time in the life of a Komodo dragon. Animal laziness at its finest.
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| There are some stories of trekkers mistaking sleeping dragons for logs and accidentally stepping on them, and having their feet bitten off. I see the resemblance. |
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| Dragon cuddling time |
Further along the path, we encountered yet another dragon,
this one just laying across the trail, as if purposely blocking our way.
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| YOU SHALL NOT PASS |
Fortunately, our guide carried a six-foot stick, forked at
the top, which he used to nudge the dragon out of our way. He’d just gotten
done telling us about the dragons’ murderous disposition, and the poison in
their saliva so deadly that even rubbing an exposed cut against a tree the
dragon has drooled on can kill you. I thought prodding this one was very brave.
Dragon mothers also eat their young if they get too hungry and are feeling too
lazy to catch buffalo, so the little ones live in trees as soon as they are
born until they are big enough to fend Mom off. Apparently the stick was
enough, though: she waddled off to find somewhere else to snooze.
We hiked up a somewhat steep incline to an amazing view:
green hills and the beautiful Flores Sea.
Finally, exhausted but thrilled with the day’s activities,
we returned to the boat and sailed back to dock in the harbor. We ate dinner at
the same row of stalls as the previous night, and went to bed (early, again: we
could hardly stay awake, and had three dives planned for the next day).
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| Beautiful sunset over the Flores Sea |
Dive day two started early. Our first dive showed us a white
tip reef shark (I hadn’t seen any sharks the day before, and was glad to see
this guy, especially as he seemed to take an interest in us and kept returning
to our view), and a handful of turtles. Turtles are always nice to watch, and
here we saw a couple feeding on the bottom, plodding along picking at things
down there, and one rising up to the surface. There were black sea slugs with
electric blue stripes, a couple of shrimps, a decent sized squid, who followed
us with his eyes as we floated past, and several upside down jellyfish, which
are exactly what they sound like. They lurk on the bottom, with the flat,
rounded “bodies” laying on the sand, and their tentacles sticking up, so that
they look a bit like seaweed or some underwater grass, until you notice that
the bodies are pulsing. We did also spot a few small rays, napping in the sand
until our presence bothered them and they floated upward and away from us,
shaking sand off of themselves as they went. Our second dive site was nicknamed
“Manta Point,” and although we did see a handful of the namesake creatures, it
was nothing compared to the previous day. We did see one that was all black –
apparently some 20% of manta rays in Komodo are colored that way, and fewer are
all white (we never spotted any of those). The final dive was a drift dive,
which was fun – we just let the current take us around the reef, as we relaxed
and watched the corals fly by. We saw some big lobsters, and a beautiful green
turtle just a few feet from me. We even saw a few dolphins playing in the water
as we surfaced. All in all, five excellent dives. We headed back to the hotel,
where we had an excellent dinner at an Italian restaurant, a few drinks at a
rooftop bar, and then turned in.
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| Rainbow spotted on our way back to shore |
The next day, our last in Labuan Bajo, we took a walk around
the port, then wandered the main road of the town. We were both glad to have a
down day, I think. Yuli left for the airport around 2, and I spent the
afternoon relaxing at the hotel and downing Flores coffees like it was my job.
In the evening, I met up with the four I’d been touring with for dinner and
drinks at the rooftop bar, where we stayed until a sudden downpour drove us
downstairs. We were all heading in various directions the next day, so we say
good night and goodbye, and parted ways.
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