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.

The worst meal ever

After getting stranded at the airport by the owner of my hotel, and then waking up in a pool of my own sweat in my suffocatingly hot room, I trudged down the hill into the town of Labuan Bajo, on the island of Flores, Indonesia.

The entrance to the town is deceptively picturesque, like something out of a Hemingway story.


This road goes more or less straight but then makes a hard left. Everything I needed as a tourist was on the far end of town so from my room it took about 30 minutes to get to anything. I don't mind walking, but the walk was pretty unpleasant.

Once around the corner the town becomes a dirty, dull and lifeless. Red and white are the colors of the Indonesian flag, and the only real colors in this photo.

There are a few tourist restaurants, dive shops and travel agents, but mostly it's just a series of non-descript shops. The owner of my hotel and my friend in Labuan Bajo both used the crappy celphone reception as an excuse as to why they weren't easier to reach.

I tried to make calls that didn't go through, but I was able to talk to a travel agent a half-dozen times on the phone. That the locals insist it's impossible to make a celphone call there is hilarious considering that every fourth shop in town sells phones or SIM cards.

I've traveled for months in Southeast Asia, but on the mainland. The people on Flores are not ethnically related to the people in Thailand, Cambodia, Vietnam and Laos. They are Muslim or Catholic, not Buddhist. Perhaps I shouldn't be surprised at how different it was.

The Southeast Asians I'd encountered until then were unfailingly friendly, even those who work in the sun for 16 hours a day and live in abject poverty. Here the people ignored me or simply stared at me as I walked by. I rarely got any response if I said hello in Indonesian or English.

I had recently been in Cambodia, where the people are incredibly industrious, and Vietnam, where the work ethic is positively maniacal. It was a shock, then, to see so many people sitting around doing nothing. I would have expected all the menfolk to be out on the water fishing, but there were large groups of teenage boys loitering in front of storefronts.

It reminded me of some of the rough neighborhoods in Baltimore. It also called to mind some of the bleak, dusty whistle stops on the chicken bus routes in Central America. There local buses go through one-road towns which aren't destinations, but rather places you pass through on the way to someplace else. Labuan Bajo has that "stop on the way" feel even though it is a major tourist destination. Very strange.

If I had to compare to anywhere it would be Livingston, Guatemala, which is one of the worst places I've ever visited. That's another tourist gateway populated by indolent youths. There was the same vague sense of menace in the air. In Livingston I wouldn't leave my hotel at night because I didn't feel safe.

I spent months in Southeast Asia and I never, literally never, felt scared. I was scared walking through the dark streets of Labuan Bajo at night. I'd pass groups of boys drinking beer who would yell at me in the local language. I don't know what they were saying but I would just laugh as if I was in on the joke and keep moving.

The young boys who don't simply stand around staring at tourists all day drive or ride shotgun on bemos. Labuan Bajo has one circular one-way road. Bemos are taxis that ride around the circle. They're mini-vans that have been modified in the most ridiculous ways.

I needed to get to the one ATM in town, which of course is at the furthest corner from my room. I hopped in a bemo, told them where I needed to go. I always ask locals what to pay for taxi rides so I knew it would be 5,000 rupiahs, or about 50 cents. I asked the guy how much it would cost. He said 5,000. No problem so far. As I got out I handed him a 50,000 note. He handed me a wad of change. I hopped out. As he pulled away I looked at the money. He gave me 5,000 in change. I paid nine times what I should have.

As a tourist I'm accustomed to paying more than locals. I know when I go to the market I will pay more than I probably should. But I'd never had anyone in Southeast Asia just blatantly rob me until then.

On that first afternoon, after visiting all the travel agents and airline offices and discovering that it was going to be difficult and expensive to get back, I decided I needed to decompress a little. I'd find a restaurant on the water, have some food and a beer and watch the sun go down.

The view was great.

The waitress was a young girl, very sweet. I ordered one dish. She came back and said "So sorry. Finish." I picked again. She came back again. "So sorry. Finish." And again. It was about 5 p.m., I was sitting at a restaurant on the water in sight of dozens of fishing boats, and yet they were out of seafood! I went down the menu line by line until we came to a dish they actually had.

Tuna in Indonesian sauce with chips (fries). Sure. I love tuna.

It was perhaps the worst meal I've ever had, and I promise I am not exaggerating to make a point. I don't know what Indonesian sauce is supposed to be. I think it was inspired somehow by the nation's islands and beaches because it was the color and consistency of wet sand. But when I tasted it -- actually, it tasted like wet sand, too.

Knowing that people would think I was being unfairly harsh, I took a picture. Consider yourself warned. It's not pretty.


I tried to pick the fish out of the wet sand. See the bones on the top left? It's not even tuna! The one thing they said they had they didn't. I was famished when I walked in but I could not gag this down. I have eaten bugs, bird's nests and congealed pig blood, but I could not eat this fish.

Two nights later, having not learned my lesson, I ordered a tuna dish at another restaurant. It was supposed to be a tuna filet and vegetables on a sizzling skillet. What it was was a few chunks of fish, probably not tuna, swimming in oil with a couple slices of onion and jalapeno.

I traveled for nearly one year in 15 countries on four continents. I did not limit my eating at all. I tried anything I wanted. I didn't get sick once until I got to Labuan Bajo. It took three weeks for my system to recover from the oily fish chunks. I a cache of antibiotics I had carried for over a year and never needed is now gone.

If you go to Labuan Bajo, don't eat the fish!

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.