All the way to LBJ

After arriving at Labuan Bajo late at night, we were glad we had the foresight to look for and book accommodation. As we walked to our hotel, the power on the whole town went out and we found ourselves walking a creepy backstreet in the dark.

The view from our second accomodation

We arrived at the hotel to find noone was around for check in. So we wandered back to the hostel we had seen earlier on the main street. The price we had seen of 70,000 rupiah per bed per night was for beds in a massive dorm room of 20 beds, but the room was relatively empty and we were pretty tired, so we crashed there. The power outage meant the hostel's water pumps weren't working, so I squatted on the floor so that water actually made it out of the shower head on mains "pressure".
The following day we decided to look for new accommodation and find a boat tour to see Komodo. Over breakfast we talked to the guy running the hostel who tried to sell us a ticket for a tour. His price seemed reasonable but my conman and sleazebag detection system was going nuts.
By chance when walking the main street, we stumbled upon a really nice accommodation of many different bungalows right up the hill fronting the harbour. A room was empty at the top of the hill and we were happy to check in there rather than spend another night at the sleazeball hostel.
The new accommodation was advertising a price with the tour agency downstairs that was as good as any of the street hagglers had tried to give us, so we figured we'd go ahead with them in booking the 2-day 1-night boat tour.

Looks good, tastes awful.

As I was saying previously, we were getting pretty sick of the standard spicy fried rice or deep fried food that we could mostly find across Lombok and Sumbawa, so we decided to go to a place called Mediterranean. The restaurant looked very nice and we ordered two of the worst pasta dishes I've ever eaten. I'm pretty sure the cheese in mine was rancid, something I didn't know could happen to cheese. That night we slept well but surprisingly I kept hearing helicopters come in and out, although I hadn't seen any all day.

The boat they told us we would be on.

We woke eagerly to embark on our tour of Komodo, something we’d been looking forward to for a while now. We planned to stay again at the same accommodation following the tour so they allowed us to stash one of our backpacks there, meaning we were only taking a smaller amount on board. We walked down to the tour agency and received our snorkeling equipment. We were given the chance to press the masks onto our head to make sure it fit okay. Given poor experience with hired snorkel gear in the past, I asked if we could have a spare set in the chance one was broken. They were adamant they would work well and they couldn’t give us another set as the rest were “all booked out”. We figured we would take our chances and walked with the agents down to the harbour.

It turned out we were right, and all the agents along the street were in fact selling spots on the same boat. After getting on to the boat we realised that the whole street was selling a pack of lies, as the boat looked nothing like the pictures any of the agents were showing, and didn’t have any of the facilities they had all told us it had. The particular agent we had booked through had taken off as soon as we had set foot on the boat, and the other seller there (who happened to be the sleazy host from the hostel) responded to my objections with “you didn’t book this boat through me, the picture I showed you was for a boat next week”. More lies shouldn’t have been any surprise to us by now.

The 'boat' we were actually on.

Without going in to to much detail, the boat was the slowest, oldest, dirtiest, loudest boat on the harbour. The helicopters I had heard at night? I now realised the sound was actually the putt putt sound of similar boats to the one we were on. Everything in the boats control was terrible. Ask me about how they punched a whole in the toilet wall while trying to motor off one of the jetties, and how they would’ve hit the jetty a fifth time if I wasn’t standing on the top deck pushing us off with a big stick. Oh yeah and of course Mimi’s snorkel didn’t work at all!

But despite that, Komodo National Park is an amazing place, we saw some incredible things, and had a really great time. Day one was a short walk on Rinca Island seeing Komodo Dragons, swimming at pink beach (not really as pink as the pictures make it out to be), a short walk on Komodo Island, and then sleeping on the deck under the stars. Day two was hiking up and getting engaged at Padar Island, snorkeling and briefly seeing Manta Rays at Manta Point, and snorkeling at Kenawa Island (a somehow privately owned island with a hell of a lot of fish and corals). It was good to see signs encouraging people not to litter and not to spoil the national park. It was also telling, however, that these signs tried to motivate locals by explaining if the park was spoilt, there would be no tourism business. What a great reason not to be a pig! Even so, the captain of our boat was still happy tossing his plastic bottles and bags right into the national park waters.

Out on the water!

Mimi, early in the peace.

The place we've been waiting for!

Here be dragons!

More dragons!

Dragon food!

Views from a hike on Komodo island.

More hiking!

Good weather!

Staying sunsafe is just as important as oriental drifting.

More views of the islands

More dragons!

More dragon food

More photos with dragons

Early morning view

The slog up Padar Island

Views from Padar

Iconic Padar island photo point

Mimi doesn't know what's coming

Bam! Engaged!

Yay!

A friend of  ours we met on the 'cruise'

Near manta point

After getting back to Labuan Bajo, we returned our snorkeling gear to the tourist agent we booked through, and I proceeded to get very annoyed with the agent as he flat out refused to accept that what he sold us was nothing like what we got, and refused to even apologise or accept that the snorkel was broken (we showed it to him there in the shop), and that there weren’t enough pillows, mattresses and blankets for everyone on the boat overnight.

We went out for a nice dinner to celebrate our engagement at the only place we had found recommended in Labuan Bajo, but it was kind of spoiled by not having our land legs back and being pretty exhausted from the last 2 days on the boat. We went back to the hotel annoyed that we hadn’t found an honest businessman in our entire trip of Indonesia so far. Slightly fed up with having to negotiate for almost every single service we needed, and people selling us nothing but lies, we booked flight tickets for the next day to Jakarta.

We got to LBJ airport with no dramas, but without doubt our flight was delayed by several hours. On the plus side, this was so common that our carrier, Lion Air, has a policy of giving people an extra meal if their flight is delayed by 2 hours or more. The flight was about four hours to Jakarta, longer than we had initially thought as we had not realised we were passing time zones. Later looking at a map, we realised just how far we had flown (Jakarta is well on the West of Java, and Java is a mighty big island) and that it was kind of a bad move since we wanted to see a lot of Java, and flying back to Bali and then travelling by land to Jakarta would’ve been more sensible. Particularly as we already had ferry tickets from Batam, an island north of Jakarta, to Singapore, to use in a few weeks time. It now seemed we would have to skip Mt Bromo and Ijen, and even Jogja looked like a pain to get to, as these are on the very east of Java.

Sensibilities aside, we also needed to sort out visas for Mimi. Travelling on a Chinese passport is not quite as easy as travelling on an Australian one, so being in Jakarta, we planned on making stops at the Singaporean and Malaysian embassies anyway. But that’s a story for the next blog.

NB. I’m now falling quite far behind on my blogs, you can see from my timeline that we arrived in Jakarta on the and I’ve just finished writing this on the 23rd of May on our flight from Surabaya to Malaysia. The next few weeks were fun but very uneventful. I’ll try to catch up soon with some of the things we have seen, but for the time being we’re pretty happy to be moving on from Indonesia and to somewhere new.

NBNB. (Nothing to do with the NBN) For those smart enough to look at the date I wrote above, you'll notice it doesn't match the publication date at all! There are several reasons I'm taking soooo long. Mainly due to laziness. But ultimately this laziness comes out of how bloody hard it is to get decent quality photos onto blogspot blog without burning up all your google drive storage. I now have a process but even that isn't perfect. As such some of the photos I wanted on here aren't here for some reason. Even once I do have them ready to go on the blog, positioning them through the crappy html editor that feels like its right out of the early 2000s is so awful that I never want to do it. So sorry about that.