Hello from the Flores Sea!

We have now been on our boat for 3 days and have already been on our first dragon spotting adventure! We left the Gili islands early on Wednesday morning for the town on Senggigi on Lombok, from where we picked up our tour bus. After a quick stop off in Mataram, the capital of Lombok, for 'personal needs' as our guide put it (KFC in our case, Maccy D's in Gemma's), we headed off on the bus across Lombok.

As part of the tour we stopped off in a couple of places on the way to the boat, in our opinion these were mainly fillers so that you feel like you haven't spent the whole day travelling but they were reasonably interesting all the same. The first place we stopped in central Lombok was a small village where the villagers make pottery; only the women can make the pottery, with the men 'doing farm work' (read smoking and doing nothing!) We watched a couple of the women making various plates, bowls etc - they're seriously quick at it; one woman managed to whip up 4 rather intricate bowls in the 15 minutes we were there! By this point the tour leader (i.e. the only English speaker) Gery, in an attempt to describe the type of work the potters did, had attempted to say manual several times but kept saying Manuel (manwell - think Faulty Towers) much to our amusement. Back on the bus we reached the other coast of Lombok an hour later where we stopped off at a small shipyard. The company who runs our tour makes all their own boats so we were able to have a look at all the new ones they were building (and check out their craftsmanship to see what we were letting ourselves in for!). They are made by Manuel too apparently!

Once we finally got on the boat we were shown to our rather compact but comfy-enough cabin. Luckily we're on the top deck so we sort of have our own balcony as opposed to being downstairs above the engine and next to the toilets! We're the only Brits on the boat, in fact the only non-Europeans; possibly why Martin and I were referred to as 'Martiin Johan' and 'Khaterine Laura' on the notice board! (they managed to get Gem's name right but to be honest how hard is 'Gemma Bruce' to get wrong?!) We have a few interesting characters on board which makes for some good people watching - a very large German who looks and acts exactly like Spence (we call him Spence - we were yet to find out the real name!). We also have 'Luke' (skinny gay bloke in the cabin next door who is unfortunate enough to look like Luke Chadwick), 'Creepy Yellow Shirt' (slimy older man with Thai bride and a very offensive shirt), and a multitude of slightly odd French people, although we have met a couple of French girls that came with us from Gili T, who are nice enough.

We set sail after lunch to Gili Kondo, a small paradise-esque island just off of Lombok. It's owned by the tour company (technically a rich Aussie) so they've turned it into a mini-resort; good for us as it came complete with hammocks, volleyball and snorkelling etc. The snorkelling was good - not the best we've seen but they had quite a few smaller pretty fish there. We had a chilled out evening round the fire while they cooked up loads of fish on the BBQ with a bit of dodgy Indonesian entertainment (dancing and out-of-tune singing) before heading back to the boat for an evening sailing to Sumbawa, the next big island along from Lombok in the archipelago. We had spent the afternoon being quite sociable and befriended the German Spencer (Domanik) and his girlfriend (Sarah) as well Miguel from Spain and Lea from Switzerland + we had the French girls we were already friends with so had a good group… we decided the rest were defiantly weird Europeans!!

After a (thankfully) smooth night's sailing we arrived in the morning at Satonda Island, a small island just off the north coast of Sumbawa. The island has a huge saltwater lake in the centre, the combined result of a volcanic eruption and a tsunami a few hundred years ago. We went ashore after breakfast for more snorkelling plus a quick hike up the hills to see the great views over the sea and the lake behind it. Having been told about the 'cleaner fish' (ones that suck your toes) me and Gem decided to give swimming in the lake a miss but Martin seemed to enjoy it, although he didn't go too far in!

We sailed again for most of the morning further east until we reached 'Kilo Beach', which is about half way across Sumbawa - unfortunately our stop over didn't last too long. Once we'd been dropped off we realised that the beach itself was actually pretty unappealing so we used Gemma's dodgy stomach as an excuse to head back to the boat for a bit of private chilling-out time and got a great view of the sunset from the sea. Last night we sailed yet again further on towards Komodo Island spending a good chunk of the evening playing poker at the front of the boat. It was another pretty smooth night and the absence of any lights on the land around us meant we got an amazing view of the stars There were literally thousands of them but unfortunately any pictures we took didn't come out at all (we have lots of pictures of black though!)

This morning we woke up to a very different landscape as we sailed in towards Komodo Island. Whereas Sumbawa is very green and mountainous, Komodo was reasonably barren with only a few trees and rolling hills - it was a pretty cool view first thing in the morning though! We docked around 8am and took a 2 hour guided trek around the island. After a lot of boring information about various plant life we eventually came across our first dragon - a 50cm-long baby one half way up a tree! Apparently it's pretty rare to see the small ones as they usually hide up high in the trees - komodo dragons are cannibalistic so are generally solitary animals and will even eat their own young if they don't get out the way quick enough!

We saw one more dragon on our walk round that was perhaps a metre and a half long, hiding in a bush. Up close they don't really seem as scary as I thought, although I haven't seen one move yet! The rangers who took us on the trek all live on Komodo so they're very used to being around the dragons. They each carried a big stick with a fork on the end to hold the dragon's head down if they need to - personally I think I'd rather have a bloke with a gun with me but they seem confident enough without one. Apparently the dragons can eat up to 80% of their body weight in one sitting - that's probably at least one of me - we kept close to a fat German man for a while, hoping the dragon wouldn't have room for seconds if he got hungry!! It's the bacteria that can actually kill you if you get bitten, as opposed to the dragons making the effort themselves. Each dragon has about 60 different types of bacteria in its saliva, some of which cause septicaemia - when the dragons bite an animal such as a water buffalo they track it sometimes for over a week waiting for it to keel over.

We saw a couple more dragons hanging around by the rangers' huts - we think they probably feed them scraps to keep them there just in case you don't see them on the trek. Again they were very placid and more interested in having a kip in the sun than eating any of the 30 people taking pictures of them (luckily for us!) After the obligatory trip though the gift shop/wooden-miniature-komodo-dragon sellers we got back on the boat for a short sail over to Red Beach, one of the best snorkelling spots within the Komodo national park (which is also a marine reserve). The beach is not actually red which surprised us a little although it did have specks of red in the sand - either way it was a really nice beach and much more impressive than Kilo beach, the one we had stopped at the previous afternoon. We spent a while snorkelling in easily one of the best places we've been to on the trip - the variety of corals and fish was amazing and the waters were crystal clear (still regretting not having an underwater camera!)

The only thing that spoiled the beach was the tour leader Manuel (see above) opting to sunbath in nothing else but his y-fronts, no trunks or towel, a kind of manual sunbathing I suppose. After another hour or so of lazing around on the beach we have now set sail for the port of Labuanbajo on Flores, where we should arrive early afternoon - looking forward to getting off the boat for some food that doesn't consist primarily of rice, boiled eggs and tofu (a favourite of the chefs on the boat). We spend the night in the port and exchange quite a few of the odd Europeans for a bunch of new (no doubt just as odd) Europeans before setting sail again for the island of Rinca in the morning for even more dragon spotting. Apparently Rinca is better for seeing dragons than Komodo so fingers crossed we'll see a few more in the morning!

Love Katie, Martin and Gem