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As I mentioned in my last post, heading from Ubud to Flores was bittersweet: Ubud is such a hard place to leave, yet it felt good to be 'travelling' again, exploring a place that neither M nor I had been before. We landed in Labuan Bajo on March 15, and my first impression was "My goodness, it's beautiful here." Bali is obviously also beautiful, but in more of a temples-and-gently-swaying-rice-fields sort of way. Nusa Tenggara, as the stretch of islands east of Bali from Lombok to Timor and the Alor Archipelago is known, is more rugged, volcanic, and (even though I haven't actually been there) reminiscent of New Zealand. Flores itself is incredibly mountainous - driving across it, it's impossible to average more than 20 or 25 mph without plummeting off a steep cliff into a thickly jungled ravine - and it's surrounded by hundreds of tiny, lushly green islands sprinkled irregularly on deep blue sea water.
When you're surrounded with vistas like these, it's hard to stop snapping photos.
Lovely!
Speaking of sea water, diving is one of the primary reasons we ventured east. (That, and the Lonely Planet description saying Flores had "the kind of beauty that grabs hold of you tightly and doesn't let go.") Flores, Rinca, and Komodo (as in the dragons) are surrounded by cold, fast-moving currents, and those conditions are optimal for healthy coral and larger pelagics. After arriving in LB, we poked around a few tour operators who were offering two day/one night live-aboard snorkel/dragon-sighting trips to Komodo National Park (a UNESCO World Heritage Site). We knew we'd spend a day diving, but also wanted to check out the world's largest lizard, easily capable of running you down and taking a chunk out of you, so this seemed like a great idea. As fate would have it, we ran into a couple on the street comparison-shopping for the same tour. I first noticed them because the girl was wearing my exact same REI sunglasses, a tee shirt just like one I'd brought on the trip, and was carrying a LeSportSac purse. Obviously her taste was impeccable, so we started chatting and learned they were Americans from Seattle who'd quit their jobs and were traveling for a year...sound familiar? We joined forces and were lucky enough to spend the next couple of days with them, first on the overnight boat trip, then diving with manta rays.
Talking shop.
Dawn and Josh were eight months into their trip, and they dropped a ton of knowledge on us, from glaciers to climb in Ecuador to suggestions for travel gear. We also traded blogs, and after seeing theirs (hers and his), I was utterly ashamed of provincial little Smashadventures. We had no pages. We had no slideshows. We had no maps. This encounter spurred the recent changes you've noticed on the site, and there are more coming. I've decided to bring a computer on Part II of our journey to make it easier to update this site (lucky you, eh?). As it turns out, traveling has changed a lot since I last took a big trip three years ago. Internet cafes have been replaced by nearly ubiquitous WiFi, even in tiny villages, and M and I a laptop-less anomaly. We've also decided to add a second camera to our repertoire, so you should ideally be seeing more/better pictures in the future.
Anyhoo, the overnight trip ended up being terrific. If you were traveling alone and were thrown in with a terrible group, I could imagine it being torturous (endless hours on a small boat; sleeping on salty, humidity-moistened mats under damp blankets), but we had Dawn, Josh, a delightful Spaniard named Inigo (really!), and a dour, mysterious Frenchman named Michelle, but at least he kept to himself. The snorkeling was outstanding: vibrant colors, tons of fish, and a handful of manta rays around eight feet long that flitted around in the depths beneath us, and with one, tiny stroke of their wings, would shoot out of sight. The real stars of this trip, however, were the Komodo dragons. Watching them, I was taken back to childhood memories of the Matthew Broderick classic 'The Freshman,' featuring Marlon Brando and a reptile which in retrospect must only have been a monitor lizard, because these things were huge. Take a look:
Unless you live in Alaska, Maine, or somewhere else where you might regularly encounter bears or moose, it's easy to forget just how big animals can be. That might sound a touch inane, but until you're swimming with a whale shark or watching a giraffe pluck leaves from a branch twenty feet above your head, you're distanced from the natural awe that sheer size inspires, even before you take grace, speed, or strength into account. That point was driven home the following day when Dawn, Josh, M and I went out for a pair of dives. The first dive was excellent, albeit challenging; we swam back and forth across the face of a gorgeous underwater pinnacle, stopping and reversing course every time we hit the current. (When we mention currents around Komodo, we mean serious currents, as in sudden patches of Class II whitewater on the surface in the middle of otherwise flat ocean. Underwater, it was like swimming into a wall: try as you might, there was no moving forward.)
The second dive, however, is what inspired the sense of wonder I mentioned before, even more than the snorkeling we did the previous day. Because guess what animal loves currents? Manta rays. Our dive site was named 'Manta Point,' and this was not an oversell. We saw at least a dozen rays, some up to four and a half meters long. When I was a kid, I read and loved the Scott O'Dell book The Black Pearl. This was the cover on the copy my classroom teacher gave me, and until that dive, I always assumed the cover artist was employing visual hyperbole for effect. Not so. For nearly the entire duration of the dive, I was yelling "Holy shit holy shit holy shit holy shit" inside my head. The rays were astoundingly large, smooth, and powerful. They didn't swim as much as fly. I know I've used the words terrific, excellent, and outstanding in this post already, but if I didn't use another superlative word here, I'd be understating the experience. It was amazing. Luckily for us, our new friend Josh was equipped with a GoPro, so he captured some of the magic and shared it with us to share with you. Check it out:
After one last dinner, M and I bid our new friends farewell, and continued eastward along Flores towards Mount Kelimutu. Check back for pictures and videos soon!
Signing Off,
S&M
P.S. Wondering about the title of the blog post? On the day before we left for this trip, I dropped by Walgreens to pick up a stick of deodorant for M. He specified only that he wanted Old Spice and something I liked the smell of. This is what I chose. As it happens, exotic winds and spicy freedom smell great, and so has M.
One look at you and I can't disguise, I've got hungry eyes.
