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.

Indonesia lessons: How not to build a hotel

I try to avoid writing negative posts. I don't want to write and I don't think anyone wants to read an angry screed unless there is something funny or instructive about the situation.

I've been letting the dust settle from my Indonesia trip. It was so awful I couldn't write about it with any sort of detachment. But I think enough time has passed that I can find the humor in it. I'll start with my hotel room in Labuan Bajo.

I flew there to visit a travel buddy I met who is living and working there. She said she would reserve a room for me in a hotel owned by one of her colleagues, supposedly the best place on the island to view the sunset. Schweet.

I called Stevan from Bali to make sure the reservation was in order. He said he knew I was coming but didn't know what days. Uh oh. That was the first sign this trip wasn't going to go as planned. I had a few questions for him about how to make various arrangements on the island but he said we could talk about that when he picked me up at the airport.

He didn't pick me up at the airport.

I waited around with approximately 5,000 taxi drivers hanging over me. I tried to call him a couple times but he didn't answer. Finally I took a taxi to the hotel. The driver stopped at the entrance to a restaurant on the hill above town.

I thought, Great, I have to wait while he runs an errand or talks to someone or drinks a beer. The truth was worse. We were at the hotel. I've traveled enough to be able to recognize a hotel when I see one but I couldn't tell.

The driver indicated I should walk down a dirt path to a house on the hill. I thought I was staying in a hotel, not a guest house, but no matter. On my way to the house I walked past the "hotel" and didn't even know it. I asked for Stevan. There were two women there who didn't speak English. One of them ran off down the hill.

At this point, under normal circumstances, I would have gone back to the taxi and asked him to take me into town to another hotel. But since I couldn't do that since I was staying with a friend of a friend. It would have been incredibly rude.

A few minutes later a man came up the hill. He was friendly and spoke English. I think his name was Pepin. He walked me to my room.

There may be a hotel there at some point in the future but for now it's just a duplex with other duplexes under construction. The rooms are so horribly misconceived it's hard to imagine the place staying open long enough for construction to finish. This is it as seen from the dirt path.


Note the wooden furniture on the deck. Note the wooden furniture on the deck with no cushions.

I have always said that when I'm traveling alone in budget mode that all I need in a hotel is a bed and a shower. For once I got what I want! The room had a big bed, a tiny end table with a lamp that didn't work, a shower ... and that's it.


I took this picture standing in the doorway. The end table is just off camera in the top right corner. The shower is on the other side of the wall on the left. At least I had a big new bed to toss and turn in.

There are two lights mounted in the ceiling close to and parallel with the front windows. They use compact fluorescent bulbs, which is good. They use decorative bulbs, which is bad. The light barely made a dent in the dark. I read just about every night before bed. This was like reading by candlelight, except the candles were in the ceiling. Similarly, there's a light on the wall outside, but it's too weak to do anything except attract mosquitoes.

The view was as good as advertised. This is what I saw sitting on my bed.


The front wall of the room was all windows. Windows that don't open. In fact, the only way to get air in the room was by opening the front door. Oh, and through the bathroom ceiling.


For reasons I can't fathom the roof of the shower is open. (The giant Flintstones shower knob was a nice touch, though.) There are trees above the opening so the floor of the bathroom was littered with leaves. Even though the place is brand spanking new the shower drain is already clogged with leaves, so there was always nearly an inch of standing water. Before I took a shower I'd have to bail the water off the floor and into the toilet.


There was no hot water but part of the water supply line was in direct sunlight, so the water temperature would swing from cool to scalding hot and then back again without warning. Fun stuff.

I suppose it makes some sense to have an open-ceilinged shower, since the air needs to be vented somehow. It's not like anyone can look down into where I shower, right?

Wrong.


The purple tower is the shower vent. The footpath goes within two feet of it!

At the end of the footpath is the restaurant. Pepin told me there was a live band at the restaurant every Saturday night. He said this as though it were a good thing. Needless to say I didn't sleep Saturday night until after the band quit around 3 a.m. But in all fairness, I wouldn't have slept anyway.

The day I arrived I flopped on the bed to rest and wait for Stevan to call. I knew he would call soon to apologize for ditching me at the airport. He would, right? Of course he would.

He didn't.

He showed up about eight hours later, leading to this exchange.

A: "I was late to the airport."
B: "I know."

(awkward silence)

This is part where traditionally the person playing part A would say "Gosh, I am so, so sorry about that." That page was apparently missing in Stevan's script.

He said he'd heard I'd taken a taxi. He asked how much it cost. I said 50,000 rupiah (about five dollars). This is the part in the script where his character would say "That was my mistake so I'll just subtract it from the bill." Instead he said, "That's too much. You shouldn't pay more than 20,000."

Thanks for the timely information.

After I arrived and before this bizarre conversation took place I fell asleep and discovered the biggest problem with the unusual ventilation system. I awoke a few hours later drenched in sweat. The sun pounds through those floor-to-ceiling windows all day long. Because there's nowhere for the air to go the room gets so hot it's suffocating. At night the island gets pleasantly cool, but my room was still like the inside of the hot dog machine at 7-11. I didn't sleep a wink the entire weekend.

Labuan Bajo is a small town. Everyone knows Stevan. When I told people where I was staying they would always say, as if on cue, "Best place on the island to view the sunset." After two sleepless nights in the sweatbox, and after all the other frustrations I endured on the island (to be detailed in another post), I got a wee bit tired of hearing about how lucky I was.

After all, I was in a fishing village on an island. You can watch the sunset from virtually anywhere. I took this shot from a restaurant quite far away from my room, where I had perhaps the worst meal ever.


That's a pretty good view. I got to the point where I was ready to crack the next time said, "Wow, great sunsets up at Stevan's place."

I don't @#$%ing care about the @#$%ing sunset! I can @#$%ing watch the @#$%ing sunset from @#$%ing anywhere! What I @#$%ing want is some @#$%ing sleep!"

The third night I was so deliriously tired that I covered myself in bug spray and tried to sleep with the door open. But it was too little, too late, and I couldn't relax anyway knowing that I had basically just issued an invitation for someone to rob me. I think sleeping (or trying to sleep) in what was basically a giant microwave oven fried my brain and gave me all sorts of weird dreams.

I imagined how the news might report my death.

An American tourist was found dead in his hotel room today, having apparently cooked to death overnight in his bed. The doctor described his condition as "medium-well". Local residents said it was especially sad that he died last night, because he missed a really nice sunset today.

I wish I could have enjoyed the sunsets more.


I couldn't, though, because I was so miserable.

Even though Labuan Bajo is a major gateway for tourism in the area it is still just a small fishing town. At night there aren't many lights, so it gets quite dark. It's a great place for stargazing. At night all the fishing boats are on the water. Their lights on the water make it look as though the stars come all the way down from the sky and into the sea.

Bali

I recently spent a week in the world's fifth-most populous country, which is ....

Indonesia.

If you knew that you're a heck of a lot smarter than me. I'm a bit disappointed in myself. It's the sort of otherwise useless information usually found on the tip of my brain. There are over 200 million people in Indonesia, a nation comprised of nearly 18,000 islands, with as many as 500 languages and dialects spoken.

I've talked to travelers who have been there and loved it. They said because it's so geographically, ethnically and linguistically diverse it takes time and patience. Seeing the country properly requires lots of time on buses on bad roads and boats with erratic schedules.

I didn't have time, but I did have a great opportunity to visit a friend there on the island of Flores. More on that in a separate post. To get to Flores I had to fly through Bali, one of the most famous beach destinations in the world.

A travel buddy I met on the way from Cambodia to Vietnam months ago was in Bali. It turned out his last night there was my first. There are beaches all over the island, catering to every type of tourist. If you want peace and quiet, or to stay in a ritzy resort, Bali has a spot for you. Nick was staying in Kuta, the beach with a reputation of being a sleazy backpacker hangout. This, of course, I needed to see for myself, so I squeezed in a couple days there.

Indonesia is primarily Muslim. Bali is the only Hindu island. As such, and as a popular destination for western tourists, it has been the target of several terrorist attacks in the past few years.

There were offerings left everywhere, even on the beach.


These little flower arrangements were everywhere, but aside from that Kuta seemed about as Hindu as Salt Lake City. This shot was taken at a local storefront showing a common souvenir.

Yep, it's that kind of place.

I didn't meet Nick and his sister until nearly midnight. We had a bite to eat and a beer but soon the restaurant closed. At that time of night the only place to hang out are the clubs. They took me to one. As we walked in Nick laughed and said over the thumping music, "Look familiar?"

It was very much like a club called Apocalypse Now that we had gone to in Saigon. In fact, it was very much like a tourist nightclub in any Southeast Asian city. We talked and drank frou-frou drinks from fishbowls and watched the freak show. There were working girls, of course, and even more shirtless guys than usual. I was a knucklehead college kid once upon a time but I can't ever remember saying, "Let's go clubbing. Wait a minute while I take off my shirt." Do I sound like a grumpy old man? Okay, I'll shut up.

Nick and Courtney went straight from the club to the airport, from which they flew to Kuala Lumpur. I slept a few hours and hit the beach.

The beach itself was awesome. Long, wide and relatively free of people asking me for money. It was outrageously expensive to rent a sunbed, though. In Vietnam I could rent a sunbed for just over a buck for the day. I seem to remember it being about the same in Thailand. In Cambodia they haven't caught on yet and don't charge for sunbeds. At Kuta beach I had to pay TEN dollars, just for the bed. Crazy.

But it was worth it to hang out with Maya, who looked ravishing even after waking up from a nap on the beach.



I find surfers, by and large, to be a pretty insufferable lot. I should clarify: I have a problem with people who think they're surfers. They tend to be arrogant and dismissive of other tourists because "we" ruin "their" beach paradises. In Kuta there were motorbikes everywhere with side racks meant to hold surfboards. But no surfboards...

There were plenty of people in the water with surfboards. Most of them couldn't even stand up, let alone surf. And no wonder. Look at this raging surf!

I was talking to one of the guys who fleeced me for a sunbed. I asked him when the surfing was good. He said this was pretty normal. I couldn't believe it. It makes Ocean City look like Hawaii. He said people don't go to Kuta to surf, they go there to learn to surf. Other Bali beaches have better surfing. I don't know if it's true but it would explain a lot.

Hence my problem with "surfers". Real surfers don't hang out in places like Kuta. They go to where the waves are. The people who surf in Kuta are more concerned about impressing other tourists than actually surfing.

End of rant.

Kuta is framed by Poppies Lane 1 and Poppies Lane 2, two narrow lanes that run more or less parallel to each other and perpendicular to the beach. Both lanes are packed with budget hotels, restaurants, travel agents, etc. Nick suggested a hotel there which was one of the best deals I've come across. From the outside Masa Inn doesn't look like much.



But inside it's huge. It looks like Melrose Place. This is one of the two pools, with my room just on the other side. Pretty sweet for $22 per night.



Navigating the lanes is, well, terrifying. There's no sidewalk. The lanes are about as wide as duck tape. Motorcycles zip by in both directions because, amazingly, the lanes are open to two-way traffic even though in places they're too narrow for one-way traffic.