30-03: 4am, very sleepy, almost complete darkness in the streets, few guys with motorbikes asking me insane prices to go I don’t know where. I had arrived in Maumere, central Flores. My first instinct was to find a hidden place where to rest until the sunlight show up in the sky, but then I remembered to use the draw I received in the ship, with the indications of a hotel where they sell airplanes and ferryboats tickets to Sulawesi (the next island, after Flores). I easily found it, but it was closed, so I walked back the road and moved towards the Catholic Church I previous saw. The idea was to sleep in the entrance, protected from the rain. When I was opening the sleeping bag, the security of the church came and joined me. Thanks to his quite good level of English, the conversation was interesting, but what I really wanted was to sleep for a while. Around 4.45am he said he needed to talk to somebody. I thought it was my opportunity to finally sleep. Completely wrong I was. He came back with the guy charged of ringing the church bell at five, announcing the beginning of the ceremony! Yah, at 5am! The security invited to join them in the ceremony and I accepted, sitting in the last chairs, a little bit hidden and with closed eyes, trying to rest for a while, once sleep wouldn’t be possibly for today. For my surprise the ceremony lasted only 20 minutes and outside was already daylight.
Back to the road I went to visit the Lareska Hotel again, once I really needed to know the available options to leave the island one week later. Nobody was able to speak English there, but little by little I managed to get some valuable information. They had a ferry to Sulawesi on April 9th, here in Maumere. Unfortunately I didn’t get information about Labuanbajo (in the west coast nearby Komodo Island, but I concluded that I could keep my one week plan moving toward west, arriving in Labuanbajo around 6 or 7, still with time to go back here in case I will not find any transportation to Sulawesi there. With this decision made, I opted to not stay overnight in Maumere, only make a walking tour around.
Hopefully, after a few hours I had enough interesting situations and many good pictures to not feel guilty of leaving the Maumere so soon, knowing that I may not come back if I find transportation out of the island in the west coast. The first one was the incredible sunrise at the harbor, with astonished view of the surrounding mountain picks and a light as I never have seen before in my life. Still in the harbor, I had the chance to see fresh fished arriving by boat, and a proud fisherman with a fish taller than him! Nearby the harbor, another great surprise, a tasty meal curiously rolled in a palm tree sleeve and the cheapest ever in my life: 0,16€! Back to the road, I had my first incursion into a tropical environment, very green and humid, and with plenty of small animals and insects unknown for me. The last memorable situation happen when I crossed the schools’ street. There literally hundreds of kids come to joined me or even follow me, ask me to take pictures of them! Many beautiful smiles, genuine happiness, euphoria for meet and communicate with a foreign, and yah, wonderful pictures started to come out!
Already in the bus to Moni I had the chance to meet the first foreign travellers here a kind and friendly German couple. I got inside the bus at 8.30am in the bus, but the German couple was there since 6.30am. They explained they spent the 2 hours making circles around Maumere looking for passengers to fulfill the bus and, because the bus was not yet full, we probably would spend some more time doing the same. They were right, only after 9.30am, with a few more passengers, with started to move out the city, not before change a wheel! One of the new passengers was Paul, an Australian travel with a very similar plan of mine for the next days, who agreed to share a hotel room in Moni in order to save some many and have company. On the way to Moni, while the drivers and the rest of the passenger were eating in a restaurant, I had the change to photograph and record a monkey in the wild, a unique and unforgivable moment, once it was my very first time! Back to the restaurant, I didn’t have lunch. But I had the pleasure to drink the best coffee in Indonesia so far!
I didn’t like so much the mentality of the people in Moni, asking too much many for food and shelter, comparing with the Indonesian standards (one exception, the 0,50€ paid for a huge bunch of bananas). They know that there are not shops nearby and that the foreign visitors surely need to eat and sleep, so they impose their cartel prices with no shame or hesitation… Not pleasant at all. Hopefully me and Paul managed to negotiate the price of a room from 6€ to 4€, 2€ each. About meals, they were all asking for 2,5€. Insane prices in Indonesia, especially because they were not that interesting, just the regular offer or inferior. We opted for the food of mister Sylvester, once he said he had to more guests, an English couple. Good decision we both concluded. The English couple were experienced travellers, talkative and with many stories to tell us. Paul and I did the same, so the 4 of us stayed until late night chatting, fueling the mind with Airak, a very strong alcoholic drink made by locals (very similar with the Portuguese “aguardente”, but tastier and made from a small green palm tree’s fruit).
31-03: Although I needed a full morning sleeping to recover from the last day, at 4.30am the guys with the motorbikes to bring us to the top of the Kelimutu National Park were already waiting for us outside the hotel. 2 minutes to put some clothes and take the camera, and although very sleepy, I was ready for the 50 minutes trip. Why do such a think? To visit the world famous 3 colors lakes of Kelimutu. And why so early? Because only at the first hours of the day the sky is clear in this altitude, for a maximum of 2 hours. When we got in the parking zone was not yet day light, but after 20 minutes walking to the very top the light was already enough to start take pictures of the outstanding view. Once again, no words to describe such unique and rich place, the 3 lakes, the mountains’ picks all around, the sunlight reflected in the far away sea the valleys and the wildlife. Better pictures than adjectives, but still, you will never full understand the feeling of being in this place with visit it. No doubt about. Only sad thing: the lake that should be red is green now. It will take several months to get red again, but nobody can precise exactly when. The big surprise: the several monkeys experts on photo-sessions, who made me busy for a quite long time, when I was trying to take pictures of them the closest possible.
Around 7.30am, and after had taken a comforting coffee (there were locals selling it), Paul and I decide to start to walks back. The rest of the foreign visitors stayed longer because they would go back down to Moni by car or motorbike. We were the only ones with a 3 hours journey walking down. We took around 3 and half hours to do it, including 2 stops. In the first I took a special local coffee made by a guy who had a Timorese expression and who gave me traditional clothes to wear. I did it, and he even passed me the machete to take a picture!! Paul and I arrived in Moni completely exhausted, but this is a walk worth to be done: jungle, quietness, exotic plants and insects (what to say about the giant and colorful butterflies!), many kinds of animals, the view of the other mountains and of the ocean, the villages and its bamboo houses, the talkative locals with their curious children, the rice field. One very important think I took from this walk around the traditional villages is that those (like me) who live in more developed countries usually imagine the life standard in places like that very low. This is a big mistake, we take like granted that many objects and tools are exclusive for industrialized societies No, there are many, really many natural equivalents that make this folks here not just as developed as us , in these aspects, but MORE developed, once their tools are 100% organic!
Back to Moni, I just had time to pack my bag, waiting outside to look for buses passing by. While doing so, I had the chance to meet the kids coming back from school, so a great photos session happens and the kids and I had a lot of fun together. Watching the photo-session at distance, the owner of the place where we were staying, a very old man, came closer to ask me if I could take a picture of him next to the name of his hotel. More, he insisted with me to upload this picture into my traveler website and advertise the hotel in the blog! Wise and cleaver old man! A little bit later I made a bus stop, asked for free room for 2 and got inside it with Paul. Once I had washed clothes to dry, I tied it up in the top of the bus. A few minutes later I was forced to remove the clothes. The first drops of what became a storm had just started to fell down. On the way I found fallen trees and bamboos, flooded roads and a too harsh environment to drive a bus. A little bit scaring but eventually with arrived in Ende. I mean, not in Ende but in an illogical place that they call eastern Bus Terminal, 5Km away of Ende. It looks like they have another Bus terminal, 2Km west from the city too. What’s the point? In a small town like Ende would be enough a bus terminal? And would be more convenient to build it in the village rather than in the middle of nowhere? And who to go from one terminal to the other? Paying a taxi or a “bemo”, obviously… And what about 2 foreigners in a heavy rain’s day? Forced to pay the overpriced bemo, 3 times more expensive than normal and after negotiation! Flores people continue to disappoint me.
Thanks to the information written in the travel guide that Paul brought with him, we went straight to a cheap hotel, sharing again the room bill. With the weather not getting better and forcing us to stay indoors, we opted to go to the internet café right in front of the hotel. Nearby, and like we predicted before while chatting in Moni, I found the English couple again entering in a restaurant. We predicted it because we knew that all of us would be moving today to this small town, but what we could never imagine was that the hotels were we would eventually stay were separated by a single wall! Impossible to be closer!
Late in the evening, I wanted to drink a coffee but the hotel’s kitchen was already closed. I crossed the street and ask to the man inside a small shop. He didn’t have coffee to sell, but because I asked again and explained that I would like to find a coffee to drink not far away from the hotel, he went inside his home to prepare a coffee for me. He made a fair price and trusted me to take his glass into the hotel. Lovely person I found here…
01-04: April the 1st, but what I’m about to say is really truth, although hard to believe: Paul, my travel mate in Flores went out of the room before me and order his meal. A few minutes later I came out too to ask for white rice, 2 eggs and a cup of mango juice. In the kitchen they told me that they didn’t have eggs, the rice I couldn’t take because my friend had already took one portion (but it was plenty of rice c
ooked and being cook in there), and the mango juice was not available (as almost all the others shown in the menu). The hotel workers and owners were not very kind, we had already understood it, but in this morning they were beavering in a really strange way. I gave up and went out seeking for food. Good decision, once I found again the “16cents meals”. I bought one with egg and another with fish.
With the right mood for adventure, both Paul and I checked the map of the town and went out in the direction of the new harbor and the long beach in the east side of the cape. Shortly after had started to walk, I convinced him to take a short-cut that hopefully lead us to a very cool surprise: the airport runway! With no fence and completely unprotected! Cool, it was the first time I was able to “invade” a runway and take pictures of it without security personal to disturb us! :p Before arrive in the harbor, we had the chance to find also a little village of lovely people with who we stayed for a while, literally Enjoying Life! At the end of this village we found several women producing tissues in a traditional way, outdoor, under the shade of the palm trees and seated in the floor. Surely a very hard job for these women, but the result of their effort was beautiful, no doubt.
Once founded the harbor, our idea was to try to find the beach shown in the city map, but from there, the only think we could see was rocks and jungle next to the seaside. Strange, once the beach should be very long and close to the harbor, therefore easy to be found! Completely exhausted from 3 hours walk in Kelimutu, Paul and I walked only a few dozens of meters, stopping in the first spot with sand. It was so small that we couldn’t even call it a beach, but the main goal was to refresh ourselves in the Indic Ocean waters and rest for a while. For my big surprise, near the red rocks on the seaside, I found a kind of very small fishes that were able to walk on the water surface, jump from the water to the rocks and vice-versa very quickly and also stay attached in the rock surface for a while! Unbelievable!
Back to the road, walking towards the southern part of the cape, always with the beautiful view of the big green hill at our right, we found a very small village, Arubara, where we stopped to by a refreshing soda. Meanwhile a group of curious people from all ages was formed around us, I started to play football with the kids, Paul found 2 girls with a good level of English who explained us that the beach we were looking for was precisely the village’s coast! And we were only a few meter away from it! The young women and dozens of kids joined us and all together went to beach. What a paradisiac place, for all the reasons, the fauna and flora, the rocks, the ocean, the island on the horizon and the mountain picks in both sides of the bay… and the black sand beach of course! Black sand! There was the reason why we couldn’t “see” the beach from the harbor! The bad aspects were the big amount of plastic rubbish spread throughout the beach, and the kids asking for money at our departure. It was the first time it happened since I arrived in Indonesia, and I got really disappointed… better the 2 girls, more genuinely interested to interact with us, although their first question were if “We were married?” and “How old were we?”. Lol…
At the evening, 2 very good decisions we took. The first, to eat in a seafood restaurant. The prawns and the coconut rice were really tasty, and the price was only 1,5€, drink included! The second, to enter in a big shop. Usually I hate shopping, but this time, with so weird goods in the shelves and with Paul to talk and make fun about it, it was a really joyful moment! And yah, I took a lot of cheap food with me, preventing a similar situation like the one that happened in Moni: no shops and only (expensive) tourist prices in the restaurants.
02-04: Early morning, once again, Paul and I went out, this time to the city center, already checked out from the hotel and with the bag in our backs. First stop, the Museum of Bung Karno, the Indonesian nationalist leader who was imprisoned during the Dutch colonial period. Unfortunately it was closed, so we gave a look from the outside and moved towards the harbor zone searching for the street market. We walked around the city for a while, having time to find several street of business, but we didn’t found the market. The best think I made there, I guess, was to have bought 4 packs of those 16 euro cents for the journey, and to visit the old harbor and the very dirty beach nearby! :p
By bemo (the mini táxi-bus), we went to the east bus terminal, in Ndao. There we expected to take a bus to Bajawa as soon as possible, but unfortunately it was 10.20am when we got there, and the next one would be only at 12. The terminal is situated right in front of the a nice beach. It was very hot weather, i needed to refresh and i din’t wanted to wait seated in the bus station, so i took an easy decision, to go swim and rest for a while. The beach, the warm water and the waves were great, and it was really relaxing to be on the water watching the paradisaic landscape around me, but the accumulation of plastic rubbish in the beach was really disappointing. I got back to the bus station at 11am, just on time to get into the bus that was arriving. The bus was the one that would leave Ende at 12, so it was just arriving at the city, still full of people. We entered it anyway, so we had a joyful city tour who brought us to the street market that we failed to find previously, and passed by almost all street of Ende. Great opportunity to take some nice photos! 🙂 Back to the terminal, around 12.30pm, I helped the guys to find costumers, screaming “ros, ros”, “Bajawa, Bajawa, Bajawa” loudly so everyone could listening! The road to Bajawa was really interesting, for the outstanding landscape and traditional villages, so when we stopped in the middle of the way, to take pick up some bags with grass, I helped to bring it up to the top of the bus and I seated on it. The rest of the way to Bajawa I did seated there, in the top of the bus, an amazing experience, and a unique opportunity to have a privileged place to watch the landscape and take picture. And more, to interact with the shocked locals passing by the road! In two occasions, 2 different girls said “I love you”, inviting me to marry them! lol! 🙂
The first impression of Bajawa was great, outstanding landscape surrounding the town, plus a big event going on. We asked about to the bus driver what was happening; we told us it was a match of the regional volleyball league. The second impression was awful: the local taking advantages of the foreign visitors, like happened in Moni, but this time much worst, with completely no respect and insane prices. In the first hotels and hostels we checked, they were asking for about 13€/night. More expensive than hostels in Europe, in the middle of nowhere, a town in the countryside of Flores, where minimum salary is about 50 euros, and the buildings are made with local materials, was pointless the speech of the guy in the tourist office telling me that this prices were fair for this place. Bullshit! Eventually we found one for 6 euros, 3 each, so we accepted. After have settled down, I went out seeking for the volleyball match, but when I got there it had already finish. In the volley field were only children playing on their own way, until the moment they saw me. From this moment on, and despite my several requests to keep playing (so I could take pictures of them playing), they forgot about the match and followed me asking for pictures. I gave up and accepted their conditions, but I started to get stressed with the boys’ behavior. Girls with their shy and kind smiles, looking straight to the camera let me easily take wonderful pictures. The problem is the boys, always with the ridiculous hip-hop body language and hands language. And worst, the disrespect they show to the girls, pushing them away, even beating them, so they could be in front and be photographed. How many wonderful pictures I missed in the last second because of the silly boys jumping in front of the girls? Mmmm… It was not the first time (I had the same experience in Ende), but here was simply too much and I got mad about it. I showed them an angry face and went to seat a little bit further. From there, with the big zoom lens I had, I kept taking pictures of the girls who eventually noticed and joined me, not only to take more pictures, but also to talk with me and teach me some words in Indonesian. They were really kind and cleaver, talking quite good English for their age (8 to 10). No doubt the girls around here are much more cleaver, educated and polite than boys. And that make them much more interesting than the rude and 50cents style boys…
As I said, the girls taught me several words in Indonesian. Among this words I found some very similar with the Portuguese equivalent. No doubt they must have imported those words from my mother tongue, taking in consideration the morphology of the words and the cultural background of some of these words. I have being collecting words in Indonesian similar with the Portuguese ones since the beginning of the trip, but now that I added several more thanks to my new little friends’ lesson, I think the right time to share it with you arrived:
Bahasa Indonesia – Portuguese
Gereja – Igreja (Church)
Mentega – Manteiga (Butter)
Meja – Mesa (Table)
Minggu – Domingo (Sunday)
Sabtu – Sábado (Saturday)
Bola – Bola (Ball)
Sepatu – Sapato (shoe)
Roda – Roda (Wheel)
Misa – Missa (Mass)
Keju – Queijo (Cheese)
Pesta – Festa (Party)
Pastor – Pastor (Padre) (Priest)
Jendela – Janela (Window)
Sendal – Sandálias (Sleepers)
02-04: A few days ago, Paul read on his LonelyPlanet guide for Indonesia that nearby Bajawa there’s some “very traditional” villages. And they say more: with around 20€/day/person a visitor can have a guided tour around several of those so called traditional villages, where he will be able to find “souvenir shops” of stuff made there, and where he can sign guests books. Ah, and a generous donation is expected from each visitor!!! I find this all but traditional, and the price of the tour is almost half of the minimum salary here in Flores. Maybe this story explains, at the least partially, what happened yesterday with the hotels, and also all the stress I had today. I’m starting to wonder who are the biggest responsible for this disgusting situation, the greed locals, or the tourist who previous came here to spoil them…
Today decided to make a tour by bike with a guide. And decided not to do it, for saving reasons and for the reasons written above. So I kept sleep a few more hours, delaying the bad experiences yet to come in the streets of Bajawa.
In Moni the hotels and restaurants owners take advantage for the convenient location of their village (nearby the Kelimutu National Park), offering to the foreigners too cartel prices far above Flores standards. In Ende men where quite unnerving, asking constantly if i needed a motorbike, a taxi or a guided tour. Here we can find a explosive combination of both, plus the rudeness after we refuse their services, shown by pejorative jokes and laughs. The town is interesting, its surrounded by a wonderful natural environment and big mountains, so it is logical that foreign seek to visit it. But there’s no need for this negative reception…
And there’s more, for the first time since I landed in Indonesia, I had here the very unpleasant situation of having kids asking me for money, insisting too much, even if I haven’t spoke with them at all. They are stressful, following a person for hundreds of meters, still asking for money and not giving up after see my aggressive expression… With such a harsh social environment, I took refuge in the hills, enjoying the nature and relaxing for a long time, coming back to the town only to get back to the hotel and the internet café, and to go out at the night with Paul to a restaurant where we drunk some beers and had the nicest and longest conversation of the trip.
South East Asia 2011 