Flores

Dave and I decided that we would really like to visit the island Flores while we were in Indonesia. To get there we did a three day long bus and ferry marathon. We arrived in the town Labuanbajo tired, achy, and grumpy. We had a busy evening to arrange our flight out of Flores in time to leave the country before our visas expired, and to book bus tickets for the following morning so we could go to central Flores.

In the morning we left at six am on the regular bus to Bajawa. The bus ride takes an incredible twelve hours to cover 250 kilometers. When we got on the bus we were dismayed to find that the whole floor was covered in giant sacks of onions. We had to walk on the onions to get to our seats. The whole bus smelled of onions. We drove around town until there was no possible way to cram another person or article of luggage onto the bus then we hit the Trans-Flores Highway. This must be one of the most beautiful highways in the world. It twists and turns through lush forest, coffee, banana, and coconut plantations, and past occasional stunning vistas of the ocean and nearby islands. All along the highway we stopped to pick up more and more people and somehow they fit on the bus. Not far from Labuanbajo passengers on the bus began vomiting. Many people were vomiting. They vomited for the whole trip. I was glad that all I could smell was the many bags of onions. People in Indonesia don't seem to need pee breaks. We only stopped once on the whole trip. When we were finally getting to be within a few hours of our destination, we came upon a section of road that was under construction and was very slippery. After a very long wait and much animated conversation that we could not understand, our bus finally managed to inch around the construction, and we expected to be back on the road. Instead the bus pulled over again. Once again there was a lot of loud, excited conversation that we did not understand. Eventually the bus started to go again, but not all of the passengers were on it. We did not know why but were glad to get moving. As we rounded the next corner we came to the scariest moment of this trip, possibly of my life, when the bus came very close to careening off the muddy road and down a cliff. Luckily we did not. Once again the bus pulled over. The few passengers who had realised the danger in advance re-boarded the bus, and we continued on to Bajawa. I have never been so happy to get off a bus. I was not looking forward to our return trip.

In Bajawa we joined a tour to visit some of the nearby traditional villages. We both really enjoyed our tour. We learned a few things about the local people. Some of the ladies in the villages were making beautiful fabric on manual back strap looms. We also saw some of the amazing things that grow in this part of the world. At the end of the day we went to a natural hot spring to sit at the waterfall where the hot and cold rivers mix and make it a lovely temperature for bathing.

The next day we took another local bus to go to Riung. This trip was much less exciting than the last. The people on the bus were enjoyable to spend time with even though they spoke very little English. They enjoyed looking at the pictures we had taken lately. I took their picture and they took mine. As more and more people boarded the bus we tried to help people to fit in comfortably near us. There were two other tourists on the same bus as us. Even though we do not speak Indonesian we could tell that this Dutch couple (who had been part of our tour group the day before) was not very well liked on the bus. They complained about how long it took to leave town and how many people were squeezing onto the bus. The last straw with the others on the bus came when the couple refused to let someone sit in the isle beside them. Someone always sits there. A man had to stand for the entire six hour bus ride as a result. The people around us began muttering angrily (they politely included us in their conversation by saying "very bad" and pointing at the offending couple). Seriously, if you don't like how anything is done in a certain part of the world, you should probably just travel somewhere else instead of making a jerk out of yourself. Sometimes tourists can be very offensive. I hope that we are not often similarly inappropriate without realising it.

Riung turned out to be a very small town. Really the only touristy thing to do was to hire a boat and go snorkeling by the 21 islands of nearby Seventeen Islands Park. In Riung we began asking around about the options for getting back to Labuanbajo. We were hoping to find a way to avoid a sixteen hour bus ride of doom. The only other option that we found was a boatman who would take us to Labuanbajo for 2 million rupiah. That's a lot of money. In comparison, the bus would cost us between 100 000 and 200 000 each. We talked about it that night and decided that if we could barter the price down to 1 300 000 or less we would go by boat because the trip would be several hours shorter and we really wanted to avoid the bus. The next day the boatman approached us. His family wanted to go to an island near to Labuanbajo. We could come along for 1 million and he would throw in a half day trip to an island for snorkeling for free. We got the price down a little bit more then happily got our swimming gear together to go snorkeling for the afternoon. I think what happened was the boatman's family wanted to go home for Ramadan (he told us they were Muslim) but they could not afford to. The money we paid was enough to finance the whole trip for everyone, but also a great price for us.

We have been traveling in southeast Asia for nearly a year, but we had not yet tried snorkeling. The truth is we are not strong swimmers (I am particularly awful at swimming) and it seemed a bit terrifying. I'm sure that we were very entertaining to the boatman and his helper. We stood in the waist-deep water and stuck our faces in. After a couple tries we found that it was indeed possible to breath like this. Next we tried moving around a bit and found that the water here was very easy to swim in. We floated so easily that we could just lay in one spot and look at what was going on below us. We were excited to see some pretty fish and a bit of coral about the size of a pomelo. Eventually the boatman started waving his arms and yelling what direction we should swim to find coral. Apparently we still swam the wrong direction. He sent his Friend out to show us. I followed him (very slowly) and found an absolutely amazing display of colourful coral and even more colourful fish. Once Dave and I started to figure out what we were doing, we really loved snorkeling. It was so beautiful and interesting. Wow.

Our boat ride the next day was very enjoyable. It was much more comfortable than the bus. We left at 5 in the morning (yuck) and were in Labuanbajo by 3:30. The scenery was lovely. We enjoyed having the family on board. It would have been much more boring with just the two of us. Did you know that babies here don't wear diapers? Their parents just pack a lot of pairs of pants. Well now you know.

We are now in Singapore. We flew from Labuanbajo to Denpassar on an airline with the reassuring logo "Wings Air: Fly is Cheep". Then we flew to Singapore on Air Asia.