The boat trip to Komodo
Had breakfast at the Puri Bunga, which was not a pancake - rejoice. Toast with two flavours of jam and an omelette and orange juice constitutes gourmet cooking here. Got picked up at our hotel by the Perama bus for a 3 day/2 night boat trip to Komodo and beyond, well worth not sweating down the road with the backpack. Two bus loads of people are taking the tour.
First stop was Mataram in Lombok, and the Mataram Mall, which is open 24 hours. Why this is remains a mystery as most of the shops weren't even open. Although there were some people doing a cooking course in the middle who were singing a song about togetherness and banging pots and pans to music like they were in a cult. We did however chat to a man that worked in the car park and he was nice. Also, some small boys followed Hannah around - the blond hair blue eyes white skin thing is a fascination here. Otherwise, a pretty pointless visit.
The tour continued across country to a traditional sasak pottery village. It felt a lot like being on coach trip. We watched the women doing pottery and it was pretty impressive in all fairness. There was a chance to have a go, but this was not deemed a good idea by us as it would have meant putting hands in a bucket of death water. However, we might buy a sasak pot back home as they did look nice. The tour guide then took a photo with Hannah 'for his teacher' - the blond hair strikes again.
Back on the bus, and next stop was a 'traditional fishing village'. By this, the tour company actually meant 'a town where we build our boats by employing local people and taking over their town with our branded flowerpots'. We saw a big boat under construction which was pretty cool, and they gave us tea. Mr Perama himself was there polishing a boat in a vest and waving. What a privilege.
We then went to board the boat for our tour which was pretty much what we expected. We had a cabin next to the captains room, which luckily we didn't have to share with a third person (as was possible) as it was rather compact, especially with the packs in. Our first sail was to an island that Mr Perama owns, the Perama Resort where we inexplicably stayed for 5 hours. There was a promise of snorkelling, but the snorkels were suffocating and the sea was brown with sand. We saw some brown coral and two brown fish. Then we did some coral replantation, which involves tying a piece of gungey coral to a plastic pipe attached to a slab of concrete with plastic cable ties, after which they get lobbed in the sea. Apparently Mr P is well into his eco stuff. There was briefly some beach volleyball, but Nik failed to don the Top Gun glasses and get involved. Then it mainly threatened to rain, so we pottered about and chatted to people. Dinner was served off the BBQ, which was tuna, with some noodles and rice etc, then some corn cooked in a fire (apparently not appetising). This was accompanied by the staff playing guitars and bongos and singing songs. Bob Marley and Jason Mraz high on the agenda as ever in this place! Everyone was chilling by the bonfire and falling asleep, and then they made us go and do a line dance in the sand to some Indopop music. It was dark, difficult and overall very surreal!
Back on board it was the first night of sleep. First annoyance is the constant waiting for the toilet because of the Europeans who want to constantly take showers. Nik took the top bunk, Hannah took the bottom. Sleep wasn't too bad, although Hannah struggled a bit, especially leaving here travel bands on round her wrists and waking up in the night with no feeling in either of her hands.
It was a fairly peaceful sleep until disaster struck at 5.30am. Nik was first on the scene to investigate. Unfortunately, despite only having been on shift for 90 minutes, the captain of the boat had fallen asleep and managed to ground the boat in a bunch of coral, so it became completely wedged from front to back. Best of all, it was facing towards an island, yet not the island we were meant to be visiting. It was lucky it wasn't a more serious accident. Nonetheless, I doubt Mr P would be happy about this.
Anyway after much stress, it was decided that we would go ashore on the new island, as this apparently would make the boat lighter when high tide came so maybe it could move (along with throwing all our water overboard of course!). So instead of hiking around Satonda island and visiting a salt water lake with fish that eat your dead skin and going to a viewing point on a hilltop, we went to Moyo island. Bemused locals greeted us on the shore, including an old man with a knife tied to his side, and a Sumbawa cigarette - tobacco in a banana leaf. Moyo has one attraction, this being their population of flying foxes. These are less like foxes and are basically big, noisy bats. They are amazing things and there were loads of them everywhere, and this passed the time for around 15 minutes. We then were taken on a walk up a dirt path through the villages, some people had quite cool houses. We stopped for half an hour at a small beach with nothing really to see. Then we walked back down the path and sat under a tree with the locals where they gave out coconuts and we waited for them to fix the boat problem. Luckily after a couple of hours on Moyo, we were taken back to the boat away from the killer ants that were everywhere.
Back on the boat, we anticipated that we would then resume out programme for the day, which involved visiting a beach and snorkelling. As we were so behind, this did not happen and we spent the whole day sailing, until after a small revolt, they dropped anchor for a while near a black sand beach. Some went ashore, we didn't bother, and instead stayed behind on the boat chatting to the others. There is a real mixed bag on the boat, including , to name but a few, an odd german family with a bearded son, an overfriendly swiss couple, a cool german guy called Rudy, an amusing French man, as well as some normal people - Matt and Claire from Cheltenham (who have outdone us and are away travelling for their honeymoon for a whole year), and Rory and Jana from Canada.
We sailed into the evening, but it got really boring, and then the sea went choppy, so it was also hard to move around and quite nauseating. Hannah decided to take a shower just as the boat hit a choppy patch, which was interesting, and felt sufficiently sick that she skipped dinner. The crew put on some rubbish film dubbed in Indonesian, but the six of us normal people were watching it. Then they decided to turn it off part way through and put on another film - Navy Seals 6: Journey into Darkness. This meant bedtime - the others in fact had already had to sit through the film the previous night.
Bedtime was interesting what with the stormy weather conditions. Hannah took her highly sedative travel pills which in fact gave her a pretty amazing night's sleep.
Next day it was up at dawn again to resume the actual programme of events and we headed bright and early from the boat over to Komodo island. We had to wear our tour t shirts today, but Nik customised his to be a sleeveless and Hannah worked the look by making a sleeve into a headband. We were split into two tour groups on the island. They had the nerve to call our groups the 'B' group, but we were really the T Team - at least team t-shirt bothered to wear the dress code.
We managed to see some dragons (hooray) although it was worrying that the guides only have a pokey stick to protect everyone with, no dart guns or anything. On the trail we also saw a wild boar, some lizards and some random birds as well as some great scenery, although the guide pointing out 'sand' was not a high point. To be honest, despite everything over the tour, we did see some amazing scenery everywhere from the boat - this part of Indonesia really has the greenest green and the bluest blue you've ever seen. We hopped on the boat again and went to a really nice beach in Komodo called Red Beach because there is red in the sand. The water was crystal clear and freezing cold and was perfect. Although while we were in the sea, the Germans laid out their stuff over our patch and that sucked. We only got a couple of hours at Red Beach which was a shame, but was nice to cool down. Also in news, Hannah taught Nik to float in the sea and he was very smiling and happy about this.
We headed back aboard for more sailing to get to Flores island, our final destination. To pass the time, Nik and Matt decided to have a go on the musical instruments and subsequently spent around two hours entertaining the Indonesians by playing along to Bob Marley, Michael Jackson and UB40. On arrival in Flores, we had to get off our boat into a cement boat (spelled semen here tee hee) and then clamber a plank onto the harbour. The boys left Hannah and Claire in the port while they went to find a room and some Indonesian children took photos of the blond ladies - its becoming a daily occurrence.
We checked into the hotel and showered (bliss!) and chilled out and found that three of the kids from the Hotel Elen in Sengiggi the first time we were there are staying here too with a friend who's from Dulwich - such a small world when you're travelling! We went out for a coffee (or a stronger beverage) with the other two couples from the boat and found a really nice place, the Lounge Bar which did excellent iced coffees. We then walked to the harbour for the Perama boat farewell party, but when we got there, the tide had gone down and there was only a broken plank to get into the cement boat. While Rudy came to the rescue and some of the others braved the plank (over a huge expanse), we concluded that the risk was not worth the free dinner, undoubtedly of rice and supernoodles again. Instead we went back to the Lounge for pizza, but were foxed when it turned out that they had no mozzarella. Luckily we ran into Conrad who runs our hotel and he took us to a good restaurant where we drank beer, ate good food and slated boat trip we had just been on. An excellent end to an interesting three days, even if there is a crazy feline caterwauling outside our hotel room door!