Komodo drag

This is the airport in Labuan Bajo, on the island of Flores, Indonesia. The town is the jumping-off point for the island of Komodo, which lends its name to the komodo dragon, the world's biggest lizard. This sculpture of a dragon is the closest I came to seeing one ...

I didn't have the time to visit Indonesia properly, but I couldn't pass up the opportunity to see
A) a travel buddy of mine, who was working there
B) komodo dragons
C) manta rays

I saw
D) none of the above

The trip to Flores was the worst travel experience I've ever had, a hideously expensive, frustrating, time-consuming, infuriating, exhausting, humiliating fucking nightmare. It was also literally sickening, as it took weeks for my digestive plumbing to recover from the culinary abomination I detailed in my post entitled 'The worst meal ever'.

I've been struggling about what to write, if anything, about the experience. It's been hard to put my thoughts in order because every time I try I am overwhelmed by anger and humiliation at how rudely I was treated by my friend there. I don't want to write a post that is just a hatchet job of someone I once considered a friend, someone I will refer to in this post as The Collector.

Flores is not easy to get to and from even though it's the gateway for visitors wanting to see the lizards on the islands of Komodo and Rinca. People make the trip to see something they can see nowhere else on earth: lizards 10 feet long and 150 pounds that can eat virtually anything, from king cobras to horses and buffalo.

Big.

It's the sort of thing that makes nature nerds like me go wobbly in the knees.

I didn't worry at all about being able to set up a trip to see the dragons because The Collector had landed a sweet short-term position as a communications consultant for a conservation group working at Komodo National Park. The dragons were her job.

Indonesia is fast becoming the world's premier scuba destination. Around Komodo are some of the best sites in the world for diving with manta rays. The Collector is an avid scuba diver and underwater photographer with hundreds of dives under her belt. Living on Flores she would know the best dive shops and sites. So I wasn't concerned about that either.

The Collector almost completely ignored me. Truly bizarre. I spent virtually every waking minute trying to make arrangements for my return flights to Cambodia and trying to set up a boat trip to see the dragons. I spent a lot of time, energy and money to get there. It's not like driving from Baltimore to Philly to visit someone. It's more like driving from Cancun to Mount Rushmore. And then not seeing Mount Rushmore.

She set up a dive trip, true, but to two sites where there was no chance of seeing mantas. She did, however, go on a memorable dive where they saw at least fifteen mantas. This happened the day I arrived, so she was experiencing a once-in-a-lifetime dive while I was on the island waiting to hear from her.

Getting to Komodo Island, or Rinca Island, which is an even better place to see the dragons, was surprisingly difficult. I only had two days on the island. I wasn't able to arrange anything. If I wanted to go I would have had to hire a fishing boat by myself. It would have been expensive, but I was willing to pay. What worried me was spending eight hours in a wooden fishing boat with two men who don't speak English. The list of things that could go wrong is endless. The Collector provided absolutely ... no ... help ... whatsoever.

While we were on the dive boat I was talking to another diver, since even on the tiny boat she still managed to avoid me. We stopped briefly while some divers offloaded into a smaller boat which took them to a beach on a nearby island. I made a mental note to find out why later.

I was flabbergasted when I did. The island the other divers stopped at was Komodo. I don't want to put on my tinfoil hat and get all conspiracy nut-ish, but it's baffling that it didn't at least come up in casual conversation that, oh, by the way, we'll be stopping at Komodo and you can get off there or Hey, that's Komodo Island over there! Even the divemasters didn't say anything. Weird.

I'm confident it's the last time I'll ever see her. The rudeness was so calculated and so complete that even now I can't think about the trip without getting riled up. I've never felt so offended.

Because it was so difficult to arrange a flight back from Flores to Bali I had to wait to book the bigger flight, from Bali back to Phnom Penh. Every traveler knows that the longer you wait to book the more it costs. It cost me $250 to get from Phnom Penh to Flores. It cost me nearly four times that to get back. I could pay for my hotel in Vietnam for four months on the $1200 I spent on airfare, which is especially maddening since I spent all that time, money and effort and didn't see a dadburned thing.

This is Labuan Bajo as seen from the dive boat. From the outside it looks charming and quaint but from street level it was dirty and drab.


The weather was sunny, which made for some pretty pictures but also some sleepless nights in my hellish hotel room, which was as comfortable as the inside of a crab steamer.

Whie there is some tourist infrastructure Labuan Bajo is still primarily a fishing village. As our scuba boat moved from site to site we passed fishermen paddling along in wooden canoes.

Getting from Bali to Flores and back again was a case of "you can't get there from here". There are three airlines that fly the route. The Labuan Bajo airport doesn't have lights on the runway so they can only fly during the day.

I couldn't book my return ticket from Bali (huh?) so I spent virtually every waking moment trying to make arrangements to get back. Every time I mentioned my difficulty to The Collector or another local they would tell me that Stevan, the owner of the hotel hell I was marinating in, knows everyone in town. Surely he could help me make arrangements. I would reply in my most sugary-sweet voice, "Is this the same Stevan that forgot to pick me up at the airport?"

One of the airlines was booked for the next month. Every flight, every seat. One was booked for the next two weeks. One had seats available for a flight later that week, but that was still much too late.

I found a travel agent who knew of a passenger who bought a ticket but couldn't use it. She asked me if I wanted to buy it from him. After several phone calls and trips to her office I finally got the ticket. My confidence in the likelihood that I would actually be on the flight nosedived when I saw the ticket.


Handwritten tickets are not uncommon for small airlines. But they literally crossed out the original traveler's name and scribbled mine over his! I expected them to laugh when I presented the ticket at the airport but after three hellish days, finally something went right! The nightmare was over.

The airport had been described to me as 'ghetto' but I've seen much, um, ghetto-er. I got a kick out of watching them push the baggage carts by hand to the 'Baggage Claim', where they would pull bags off the carts and stack them on the floor.