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capn_n_pyeWe’d organised a driver and guide before getting to Flores and, quite luckily, they were still waiting at the airport in Maumere, 24 hours on.
Bartholomeus, or Meus, was our guide and our driver was a young man named Agustino (‘Agus’ – we admire the confidence of a man who can stare solely at a woman’s boobs while talking to her, without any sense of shame or self-awareness). We somehow managed to all fit in the car - had Adele and Carlo brought a pack each, or had three of the four of us not been hobbit-sized, we have no idea how we would have fitted. Not that we cared – at that point we were just so damn pleased to be in Flores, we would have happily ridden a land tortoise west (actually, that would’ve been cool - and the tortoise probably would’ve been faster on the Trans-Flores ‘Highway’!).
In Maumare we made a brief stop to check out a fishing village, built after a tsunami devastated the area in 1992. Before long we headed off on a three hour drive to Moni, Gateway to Lake Kelimutu. Flores is very different from Bali and Java – it’s on the other side of the Wallace Line for starters. It’s also predominately Catholic, its houses have apparently been decorated by one of our Italian great aunts and, when it comes to tourists, it’s like a fish with a bicycle (no one knows how the fish got the bike and it doesn’t know what to do with it, but the bike is pretty damn awesome). This was demonstrated by the hotel we stayed in, in Moni. Well, we think it was a hotel. There were no other guests, and even though it got a mention in Lonely Planet, it looked more like a building site, a ramshackle cemetery, or perhaps a serial killer’s lair.
The rooms were tidy enough, if a little elderly, and Pye found a Gideon’s Bible in Indonesian to reinforce her Catholic school teaching, so we know they were trying. We got a bit confused when we went looking for the ‘restaurant’, because the only other light we could see seemed to be illuminating a bathroom. Imagine our surprise when that turned out to be the restaurant! It was only marginally less than the surprise we felt when Meus and Agus didn’t order anything for dinner, yet ate one of our shared dishes on their own (it was very confusing for all involved).
It’s actually quite good to have a nemesis in life, on which you may focus your rage, if you feel like it. Beginning with that meal, Meus selflessly dedicated himself into fulfilling that role in our lives. Not only was he competing for the title of World’s Dullest Man, he had absolutely no sense of humour, and went on to display a rather surprising lack of knowledge on most things (except for bamboo. You should hear what he knows about the types of bamboo found in Flores! We did. Several times). It probably wasn’t fair to him that half of his tour group were Indonesian teachers, but he really should know that Padang food comes from West Sumatra, not Java. And he shouldn’t do things like correct our English (Adele called Carlo ‘fussy’, and after Stinky described what the word meant, Meus replied “No, it means you like everything.”)! One time, Carlo spotted a big lizard from the car, and jokingly said, “Hey, look, a komodo!!”
“No,” says Meus ponderously, though he had not seen it, “There are no komodo here, only on Rinca and Komodo. That was a crocodile.”
We exchange pained glances, since not only was it clearly not a crocodile, we had also been treated to a five minute talk the day before on how there are no crocodiles in Flores. We also now feel compelled to call cashews ‘pears’, thanks to his wisdom and insistence that we were incorrect in our naming practice.
Anyhoo, even that funny character couldn’t ruin the trip. Very, very early (ie, 3am) the next morning, we went to Kelimutu for sunrise. It’s one of those places like the 12 Apostles – you lose your head and take a new photo every time the light changes slightly. It would be absolutely brilliant to see the three lakes from a helicopter, but we’ll probably have to wait another thirty years before some enterprising soul decides to break the tranquility by setting up a business.
It’s quite hard to get them all in one shot – as you can see, the brown lake hides behind the blue one and the black one is all snooty and off on its own, but we did our best. We even accidentally dressed to match!
It’s amazing how long a day can last when you start that early. We turned our noses west and settled back to enjoy the lurching bumpiness that is six people crammed in a car negotiating a crap road. We got a flat tyre at one stage, which gave us a bit of a break, even though we couldn’t quite figure out how they planned to get the flat off using this method:
The reader will be pleased to learn that they eventually scabbed a jack from someone who drove past. See if you can tell what the ladies did while the men changed the tyre...
We fetched up at Nduaria market a bit later, where we all watched Carlo fulfil a childhood wish to try chewing betelnut. He reported back that it tasted like arse and made his mouth numb, which is pretty much why we weren’t falling over ourselves to try it too (not that being able to gob out huge amounts of red spit isn’t dead sexy).
All that came before lunchtime, which was a brief affair in Ende. Prior to Independence, the Dutch had exiled eventual president Sukarno to Ende for a few years (“Where can we put this guy where he’s out of the way of everything?” “Hey, how bout Ende?!”). Had we been feeling more intelligent and less trusting at the time, we would have grilled Meus on why he didn’t take us to the excellent ikat factory in Ende that Carlo had visited last year when he popped to Flores with some of his SBS journalist buddies, but we didn’t think of that until later, and so probably missed out on the best opportunity to buy some quality ikat. Fie!
At bit further west (and just after the ‘crocodile’ incident) we stopped at Peenggajawa, which is a beach that happens to grow those blue stones you can use in your garden or on pot plants. Stinky was delighted because she has approximately three-quarters of that beach on her cacti at home and Meus got a bit miffed that all we wanted to do was to stop and play with the stones and water. Moose was just glad he didn’t have to earn a living from collecting rocks and sorting them by size!
A few more hours down the road, we stopped at Wogo traditional village (taking the opportunity to make several ‘wog’ jokes). People still live in the village, and the grown ups just hang out and watch the white folk (bule) wander around their yard. If tourists are allowed to look inside any of the houses, Meus didn’t let on. While the people all profess to be Catholic, the traditional villages demonstrate that it’s Catholicism with a hefty whack of animism and ancestor worship mixed through. The most obvious are the Ngadhu and Bhaga in the centre of the village:
They represent male and female ancestors (and though we were childishly amused by Meus telling us the Bhagas – pronounced ‘buggers’ – are the men, we were later crushed to learn that it’s the females who are the Bhagas) and villagers put sacrifices in them on special occasions. More graphic information on sacrifices later! The children loved playing with our digital camera, especially the ADD kid we called Lemonhead (far left):
We thought he was wearing a melon peel on his head, but it turned out to be some sort of citrus. Still not sure about what makes it irresistible headwear, though. Carlo had a bit of a game of soccer with some of the kids, but decided to pack it in when one of the kids got him in the nuts. We spose that’s how you tell it’s time to end any game, really.
We powered through to stay the night in Bajawa (Home of Flores’ Best Karaoke... *cough*) and the coolest hot springs we’ve come across. The water was really hot and the boys had a ball playing in the violently cleansing waterfall that cascaded out of the carefully channelled part.
The next day it was back in the car. We saw a lot of that car. Although we’d be driving for the better part of the day, we’d only cover about 100 kilometres a day, and none of that in a straight line. We think we started to display all the symptoms of Cabin Fever! They are: restlessness, irritability, forgetfulness, laughter, and excessive sleeping. The restlessness seemed perfectly normal and mostly no one was too irritable (except when Meus opened his mouth). None of us could remember what day it was, and had to think very hard about what had happened the day before (this could have been feverish forgetfulness, or simply our natural state). The ‘laughter’ should come with a sub-clause of ‘increasing childishness and vulgarity’, because we started doing things like spending an unconscionable length of time playing the Lyric Substitution Game. For those who haven’t come across it, while singing along to a song, you basically replace the word ‘heart’ with ‘arse’ (“My arse will go on”), and ‘love’ with ‘muff’ (“All you need is muff”). Eventually decided that nothing could be more witty or clever than to replace ‘cry’ with ‘wank’ (“Don’t you wank tonight...”). Cinderella’s Last Train Out of My Heart almost killed us with its vivid imagery.
Anyhoo, enough of our fragile mental state. Apart from acting like twelve year olds, that day we visited Bena, another traditional village. They had held off celebrating the new year until an important visitor could come that day, and when we visited in the morning, preparations were in full swing.
WARNING – BLOODY GRAPHIC IMAGES AHEAD
The first thing we heard when we got out of the car was the panicked screaming of the little piggy who was going to help them celebrate. They collect the blood in a bowl (to be placed with the Ngadhu and Bhaga, singe the hair off (by the traditional method of chucking some petrol on it), they later cook up the pig for everyone to share.
Next to Bena’s ancestor shrines happen to be next to some impressive-looking megalithic tombs, which were pretty cool. Oh, and there was also a shrine dedicated to the Virgin Mary, but that was tucked off down the back of the village (near the toilet and laundry, actually).
After that unusual stop in was westward ho once again, with a couple more stops - one to investigate the local method of distilling arak (palm wine) and another to check out Lake Ranamese. That was a pretty looking volcanic lake that provided a nice panorama, spoiled only by the soggy pile of diarrhoea some kind soul had deposited beside the viewing point. There was another traditional village, called Ruteng Puu, which is roughly pronounced as ‘Rooting Poo’, which we found marvellous and extremely witty, of course. The tree in the middle of this village is used to hang a sacrificial buffalo from every now and again. As all good Catholics do.
Thecity town of Ruteng is home to a new cathedral. Meus took us to see it and then seemed surprised when we asked if we could go inside (the answer was no). As we wandered around the outside and group of fourteen year old girls materialised from somewhere. Turns out we’re the most interesting thing they’d seen all day! Each one was introduced to us to shake hands with, even though they were too shy to actually speak. It was odd.
That night we stayed in a convent’s guest house, in the cleanest and nicest accommodation so far – and that includes the fact the city has periodic blackouts and Pye had to have a shower in the dark. Moose was very excited to bag himself another nun before we left the next morning – this one was Mexican, just like his very first nun. He was very excited.
We were excited too – as Carlo kept saying, this was the day we were going to see the homos. Homo Floresiensis, that is! The actual bones of the ‘Hobbits’ are off in a museum somewhere, but you can wander around the cave and crawl into smaller caves and slip over in the mud and stuff, which is pretty cool.
Phone reception was pretty patchy there, but it cleared up a moment to let a message from Uncle Doug through – a text that said “John Howard’s been killed”. Reception promptly dropped out for the next 45 minutes, a brief period of time when the world was a different place. Just after we put a lot of effort into various sort of death scenarios, we discovered he’d ‘accidentally’ mis-typed and had intended to say “John Howard’s a dill”. Well, duh!
The penultimate stop for the day was to check out the Cara rice fields, which apparently came about from an inheritance dispute many, many moons ago. Whyever they decided to divide the land up thus, it makes for pretty viewin’ now!
The last stop doesn’t really count as a stop, because we still kept going. As soon as we got to Labuan Bajo we jumped straight on a dinky little boat and made for Rinca Island, home of komodo dragons. The boat ride took three or four hours, where we got to stare at Jurassic Park-ish mountains and islands as we chugged past, then huddle under a piece of ikat when a tropical rainstorm decided to come and visit us. Ah, the vicissitudes of travel! We ended the day anchored by Rinca, bunking down on the deck of the ship and hoping the monkeys and komodos didn’t feel like coming to share our mattresses. More on that to follow!
Meanwhile, here’s a badly-compressed animation of where we went...
Bartholomeus, or Meus, was our guide and our driver was a young man named Agustino (‘Agus’ – we admire the confidence of a man who can stare solely at a woman’s boobs while talking to her, without any sense of shame or self-awareness). We somehow managed to all fit in the car - had Adele and Carlo brought a pack each, or had three of the four of us not been hobbit-sized, we have no idea how we would have fitted. Not that we cared – at that point we were just so damn pleased to be in Flores, we would have happily ridden a land tortoise west (actually, that would’ve been cool - and the tortoise probably would’ve been faster on the Trans-Flores ‘Highway’!).
In Maumare we made a brief stop to check out a fishing village, built after a tsunami devastated the area in 1992. Before long we headed off on a three hour drive to Moni, Gateway to Lake Kelimutu. Flores is very different from Bali and Java – it’s on the other side of the Wallace Line for starters. It’s also predominately Catholic, its houses have apparently been decorated by one of our Italian great aunts and, when it comes to tourists, it’s like a fish with a bicycle (no one knows how the fish got the bike and it doesn’t know what to do with it, but the bike is pretty damn awesome). This was demonstrated by the hotel we stayed in, in Moni. Well, we think it was a hotel. There were no other guests, and even though it got a mention in Lonely Planet, it looked more like a building site, a ramshackle cemetery, or perhaps a serial killer’s lair.
The rooms were tidy enough, if a little elderly, and Pye found a Gideon’s Bible in Indonesian to reinforce her Catholic school teaching, so we know they were trying. We got a bit confused when we went looking for the ‘restaurant’, because the only other light we could see seemed to be illuminating a bathroom. Imagine our surprise when that turned out to be the restaurant! It was only marginally less than the surprise we felt when Meus and Agus didn’t order anything for dinner, yet ate one of our shared dishes on their own (it was very confusing for all involved).
It’s actually quite good to have a nemesis in life, on which you may focus your rage, if you feel like it. Beginning with that meal, Meus selflessly dedicated himself into fulfilling that role in our lives. Not only was he competing for the title of World’s Dullest Man, he had absolutely no sense of humour, and went on to display a rather surprising lack of knowledge on most things (except for bamboo. You should hear what he knows about the types of bamboo found in Flores! We did. Several times). It probably wasn’t fair to him that half of his tour group were Indonesian teachers, but he really should know that Padang food comes from West Sumatra, not Java. And he shouldn’t do things like correct our English (Adele called Carlo ‘fussy’, and after Stinky described what the word meant, Meus replied “No, it means you like everything.”)! One time, Carlo spotted a big lizard from the car, and jokingly said, “Hey, look, a komodo!!”
“No,” says Meus ponderously, though he had not seen it, “There are no komodo here, only on Rinca and Komodo. That was a crocodile.”
We exchange pained glances, since not only was it clearly not a crocodile, we had also been treated to a five minute talk the day before on how there are no crocodiles in Flores. We also now feel compelled to call cashews ‘pears’, thanks to his wisdom and insistence that we were incorrect in our naming practice.
Anyhoo, even that funny character couldn’t ruin the trip. Very, very early (ie, 3am) the next morning, we went to Kelimutu for sunrise. It’s one of those places like the 12 Apostles – you lose your head and take a new photo every time the light changes slightly. It would be absolutely brilliant to see the three lakes from a helicopter, but we’ll probably have to wait another thirty years before some enterprising soul decides to break the tranquility by setting up a business.
It’s quite hard to get them all in one shot – as you can see, the brown lake hides behind the blue one and the black one is all snooty and off on its own, but we did our best. We even accidentally dressed to match!
It’s amazing how long a day can last when you start that early. We turned our noses west and settled back to enjoy the lurching bumpiness that is six people crammed in a car negotiating a crap road. We got a flat tyre at one stage, which gave us a bit of a break, even though we couldn’t quite figure out how they planned to get the flat off using this method:
The reader will be pleased to learn that they eventually scabbed a jack from someone who drove past. See if you can tell what the ladies did while the men changed the tyre...
We fetched up at Nduaria market a bit later, where we all watched Carlo fulfil a childhood wish to try chewing betelnut. He reported back that it tasted like arse and made his mouth numb, which is pretty much why we weren’t falling over ourselves to try it too (not that being able to gob out huge amounts of red spit isn’t dead sexy).
All that came before lunchtime, which was a brief affair in Ende. Prior to Independence, the Dutch had exiled eventual president Sukarno to Ende for a few years (“Where can we put this guy where he’s out of the way of everything?” “Hey, how bout Ende?!”). Had we been feeling more intelligent and less trusting at the time, we would have grilled Meus on why he didn’t take us to the excellent ikat factory in Ende that Carlo had visited last year when he popped to Flores with some of his SBS journalist buddies, but we didn’t think of that until later, and so probably missed out on the best opportunity to buy some quality ikat. Fie!
At bit further west (and just after the ‘crocodile’ incident) we stopped at Peenggajawa, which is a beach that happens to grow those blue stones you can use in your garden or on pot plants. Stinky was delighted because she has approximately three-quarters of that beach on her cacti at home and Meus got a bit miffed that all we wanted to do was to stop and play with the stones and water. Moose was just glad he didn’t have to earn a living from collecting rocks and sorting them by size!
A few more hours down the road, we stopped at Wogo traditional village (taking the opportunity to make several ‘wog’ jokes). People still live in the village, and the grown ups just hang out and watch the white folk (bule) wander around their yard. If tourists are allowed to look inside any of the houses, Meus didn’t let on. While the people all profess to be Catholic, the traditional villages demonstrate that it’s Catholicism with a hefty whack of animism and ancestor worship mixed through. The most obvious are the Ngadhu and Bhaga in the centre of the village:
They represent male and female ancestors (and though we were childishly amused by Meus telling us the Bhagas – pronounced ‘buggers’ – are the men, we were later crushed to learn that it’s the females who are the Bhagas) and villagers put sacrifices in them on special occasions. More graphic information on sacrifices later! The children loved playing with our digital camera, especially the ADD kid we called Lemonhead (far left):
We thought he was wearing a melon peel on his head, but it turned out to be some sort of citrus. Still not sure about what makes it irresistible headwear, though. Carlo had a bit of a game of soccer with some of the kids, but decided to pack it in when one of the kids got him in the nuts. We spose that’s how you tell it’s time to end any game, really.
We powered through to stay the night in Bajawa (Home of Flores’ Best Karaoke... *cough*) and the coolest hot springs we’ve come across. The water was really hot and the boys had a ball playing in the violently cleansing waterfall that cascaded out of the carefully channelled part.
The next day it was back in the car. We saw a lot of that car. Although we’d be driving for the better part of the day, we’d only cover about 100 kilometres a day, and none of that in a straight line. We think we started to display all the symptoms of Cabin Fever! They are: restlessness, irritability, forgetfulness, laughter, and excessive sleeping. The restlessness seemed perfectly normal and mostly no one was too irritable (except when Meus opened his mouth). None of us could remember what day it was, and had to think very hard about what had happened the day before (this could have been feverish forgetfulness, or simply our natural state). The ‘laughter’ should come with a sub-clause of ‘increasing childishness and vulgarity’, because we started doing things like spending an unconscionable length of time playing the Lyric Substitution Game. For those who haven’t come across it, while singing along to a song, you basically replace the word ‘heart’ with ‘arse’ (“My arse will go on”), and ‘love’ with ‘muff’ (“All you need is muff”). Eventually decided that nothing could be more witty or clever than to replace ‘cry’ with ‘wank’ (“Don’t you wank tonight...”). Cinderella’s Last Train Out of My Heart almost killed us with its vivid imagery.
Anyhoo, enough of our fragile mental state. Apart from acting like twelve year olds, that day we visited Bena, another traditional village. They had held off celebrating the new year until an important visitor could come that day, and when we visited in the morning, preparations were in full swing.
The first thing we heard when we got out of the car was the panicked screaming of the little piggy who was going to help them celebrate. They collect the blood in a bowl (to be placed with the Ngadhu and Bhaga, singe the hair off (by the traditional method of chucking some petrol on it), they later cook up the pig for everyone to share.
Next to Bena’s ancestor shrines happen to be next to some impressive-looking megalithic tombs, which were pretty cool. Oh, and there was also a shrine dedicated to the Virgin Mary, but that was tucked off down the back of the village (near the toilet and laundry, actually).
After that unusual stop in was westward ho once again, with a couple more stops - one to investigate the local method of distilling arak (palm wine) and another to check out Lake Ranamese. That was a pretty looking volcanic lake that provided a nice panorama, spoiled only by the soggy pile of diarrhoea some kind soul had deposited beside the viewing point. There was another traditional village, called Ruteng Puu, which is roughly pronounced as ‘Rooting Poo’, which we found marvellous and extremely witty, of course. The tree in the middle of this village is used to hang a sacrificial buffalo from every now and again. As all good Catholics do.
The
That night we stayed in a convent’s guest house, in the cleanest and nicest accommodation so far – and that includes the fact the city has periodic blackouts and Pye had to have a shower in the dark. Moose was very excited to bag himself another nun before we left the next morning – this one was Mexican, just like his very first nun. He was very excited.
We were excited too – as Carlo kept saying, this was the day we were going to see the homos. Homo Floresiensis, that is! The actual bones of the ‘Hobbits’ are off in a museum somewhere, but you can wander around the cave and crawl into smaller caves and slip over in the mud and stuff, which is pretty cool.
Phone reception was pretty patchy there, but it cleared up a moment to let a message from Uncle Doug through – a text that said “John Howard’s been killed”. Reception promptly dropped out for the next 45 minutes, a brief period of time when the world was a different place. Just after we put a lot of effort into various sort of death scenarios, we discovered he’d ‘accidentally’ mis-typed and had intended to say “John Howard’s a dill”. Well, duh!
The penultimate stop for the day was to check out the Cara rice fields, which apparently came about from an inheritance dispute many, many moons ago. Whyever they decided to divide the land up thus, it makes for pretty viewin’ now!
The last stop doesn’t really count as a stop, because we still kept going. As soon as we got to Labuan Bajo we jumped straight on a dinky little boat and made for Rinca Island, home of komodo dragons. The boat ride took three or four hours, where we got to stare at Jurassic Park-ish mountains and islands as we chugged past, then huddle under a piece of ikat when a tropical rainstorm decided to come and visit us. Ah, the vicissitudes of travel! We ended the day anchored by Rinca, bunking down on the deck of the ship and hoping the monkeys and komodos didn’t feel like coming to share our mattresses. More on that to follow!
Meanwhile, here’s a badly-compressed animation of where we went...
