Labuan Bajo is a city that I had looked at least 100 times on the map. I don’t know what I expected it to look like but it was looking pretty amazing from the deck of the boat as we blew closer to the harbor. It was looking amazing simply because it was land. If you’ve read my past few posts you know that this had been a pretty traumatizing voyage. It was high seas that day as we approached the end of our trip but I stood out on the open deck counting this minutes down until we got to the harbor and I could live the rest of my life on dry land.
Komodo National Park opened at 7:30am and the dragons were said to be most active during the early morning. We were told to be up by 7am in order to have breakfast and get ready to venture into the park, so naturally everybody woke up at 5:45am. On our agenda that day were Komodo Island and Rinca Island. Those are 2 of the 4 main islands that compose Komodo National Park and they are the only 2 islands that are open to the public.
We sailed further into the islands to a place called ‘Manta Point.’ This place was famous amongst divers for, you guessed it, manta rays. As far as I could tell, Manta Point wasn’t really an actual ‘point’, rather just a large area of water in the middle of the Komodo Islands. Our boat slowed down as we approached Manta ‘area.’ The crew leaned off the deck, scouring the clear, blue water. Then there was a shout. Off in the distance what looked like a large fin broke the surface. As we continued I could see big dark patches moving around beneath the boat and obstructing the purity of the water's light blue coloring. These were manta rays. I was so jazzed that I jumped in with no sunscreen, which was a terrible decision, but I was busy swimming through this...
We sat on the deck of the boat eating our dinner together. Nobody was speaking. We were not in good spirits. Lightning flashed silently off in the distance in all directions with increasing frequency. The coast of Sumbawa sat calmly a few hundred meters away. I watched the lights twinkle from shore, wishing I was there instead of on this boat. With the wind picking up, we could all feel the storm coming.
The rest of us, strangers to one another at this point, looked at each other, and then with an uneasy shrug climbed down onto the deck of this tiny boat. It bobbled precariously with every passing wave. One thing was certain: this was going to be interesting. So let’s fast-forward a little bit, shall we?
Our boat trip was set to depart from Lombok, the island directly to the left of Bali. This meant that we would need to stay in Lombok the night before the trip in order to get an early start the next morning. So the day before the trip started we set out early for our ferry across the Bali Sea.
Although Mount Batur has been active as recently as the year 2000, its last major eruption was in 1968. In the 47 years since, Mount Batur has been (mostly) dormant. What does that mean for us? It seems to be the general consensus on Bali that this means it is about due for another eruption. So naturally, we decided to climb it.
I was pretty infatuated with the island already as we navigated the labyrinth of strange, narrow, mossy alleyways to our ‘bungalow’ accommodations for the first night in Ubud. I was pretty fed-up with the island 2 days later as I trudged through the crowded, dirty streets looking for a motorbike in Kuta. I'm pretty sure that everyone hates Kuta. But then I was back to liking the island again later on as I road a motorbike along the winding mountain roads on the less developed Northern side of the Island.
I had been briefed on what to do in this situation and it played out more or less how it had been described to me. The policeman asked for my registration and license. I obviously don’t have an international driver’s license so he’s got me there. He sat me down in their police station and scolded me as a shook a small booklet full of prices and descriptions of various fines in my face.
I haven’t been working weekends for the past 6 months for just a short little trip so I shrugged and blocked out about 3 weeks. I have known that I wanted to do something a little bit crazy so I had been brain-storming things I could do during Tet for the past few months. So without further adieu, here’s the plan.
