I've seen Komodo Dragons in "the wild". That's pretty cool. The chances are that you haven't seen them, unless it was in a zoo, so I'm obviously cooler than you! Having said that, it didn't feel much different to a zoo, but it was still pretty cool. Do you think I've said "cool" enough in this paragraph?
Thommo and I decided that we had better get off of Bali before we got liver poisoning. We didn't have time to wander around Lombok, and we didn't want to do the same as everyone else in the Gili Islands, so we booked a flight to Labuan Bajo on Pulau Flores (Flores Island). After plenty of fun at Denpasar airport (as discussed in the previous post) we hopped on our little plane to Flores. It was a pleasant enough flight, and it was all very quaint landing at this tiny airport with very few facilities. The quaint-ness (?) was lost soon after disembarking and discovering that our luggage had not come with us. Considering there were only about 30 passengers on the flight we thought it was pretty form that Merpati Airlines had left behind 25 of our bags. It turns out they had a back-log of scuba gear to get there, so our luggage had to wait until the next day. Bastards! If they had mentioned that at check-in we would have just taken what we needed as carry-on for 2 days. As it was we ended up without everything but my camera and our wallets. Not perfect, but at least we could survive and take snaps.
So, Labuan Bajo is a pretty small town with little to offer the visitor by night. We had a quiet night that didn't even involve getting drunk! We had booked a 1-day trip for the next day, starting bright and early. Thommo, myself and a Dutch couple arrived at the office of the tour company at the arranged time in the morning, but it was 30 minutes before our guide arrived. Poor form again. Eventually we got underway, and had a lovely boat ride to Pulau Rinca ("Rincha" Island). Komodo Dragons live on Pulau Rinca and Pulau Komodo, but Pulau Komodo is further away from Labuan Bajo and requires a 2-day trip to get there and back, so we decided to stick with Pulau Rinca.
Once on Pulau Rinca we did a short walk to the "village". This is where the Dragons hang-out. Although the locals say they don't feed them I find this hard to believe. I doubt the Dragons just chill-out here because they like having their photos taken and they delight in tourist-watching. Regardless, it makes it very easy to get an extremely good, close-up look at these enormous lizards. The guides carry big sticks to protect the tourists, but you can still get surprisingly close without feeling terribly threatened. They are big, ugly and lazy looking creatures, but not always so. We went for a one-hour hike around the island but didn't see any outside the village. I had imagined scenes similar to those in "Jurassic Park", with Dragons roaming through the fields, frightening the lesser creatures by opening their big jaws and breathing out fumes from their giant infectious gobs. It was not to be. We did see lots of photos of them fighting and hunting, but the best evidence of them doing anything except posing for photos was the occasional hole which they had dug for laying eggs.
One of the undoubted highlights of this little sojourn for a relatively new Indonesian resident was that I got to use my favourite phrase:
"Astaga!!!! Naga!!!!" which translates to "Oh my God!!!!!!! A dragon!!!!!!!"
My Bahasa Indonesia teacher was very proud upon my return.
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