the boat to flores

We'd heard a lot about Flores and it had received rave reviews across the board. A bit wild, a bit far, a bit backwoods, a bit native…sounds good, right? Also, since Helen was inconsiderate enough to catch dengue fever on my birthday (!!!) I decided a nice liveaboard dive trip through the Komodo Islands would be the perfect gift from her. Luckily, Flores is right next to Komodo so two proverbial birds were killed with one stone. Flying would have been way too easy so we decided on the 5 day/4night sleep-on-the-deck-of-a-fishing-boat backpacker trip.

A beautiful sunrise greeted us at 6am when we met at the local jetty to take the boat to Lombok. The clouds started collecting overhead the second we got picked up by a bus on the other side. Our group spent most of the day shuttling across Lombok collecting food and drink for the trip. My first impression of the boat was that it was a floating Sanford & Son. My next thought was a question: are this many people supposed to fit on that for 5 days?!? And, my third deliberation was pure wonder as to whether or not the vessel would actually make it out of the harbour before sinking. As soon as we boarded our mighty cruiser it started pouring. We were running late so the first night we ducked behind a small island off the coast of Sumbawa, one of the archipelago of volcanic islands that exend from Java to Papua. The next morning was cloudy, but we were not deterred. Our boat went to Moyo Island where we swam to shore and hiked to a waterfall. Those little bugs that are covering the tree in the bottom row are water lice that Helen spotted and are about the size of your little finger-nail. Just imagine millions of them clumped together climbing over one-another in massive moving mounds – it made you itch just looking at them!

Later that afternoon the gray skes turned into a raging storm and there was not a lot of pictures taken...sorry folks. Plastic tarps draped the sides of the deck, but between the twin diesel engines slapping all night and the tarp-evading horizontal rain we only got a few hours of sleep. We did not take pictures because it was just too wet. At one point it got so rough there were a coupleof times the bow went under a wave. I think the low point was when one of the engines threw a rod and the crew decided to shut them both off. The silence was deafening. We were out of the shipping lanes and pretty far from land, it was very dark, and we were without a cell phone signal (what about a ship-to-shore radio you may ask? I just laugh!). The first mate pulled me aside to inform me we only had one functioning engine and asked what I thought we should do. Whether going east or west, we were about the same distance to civilization (in this case small fishing villages), but the current was going west. According to him, the running engine had just been rebuilt and he felt confident that we should forge forward…to the east. We sat in silence. The bilge pumps had shut off with the engines so the boat was riding low. We decided to forge ahead. The storm got a little worse, but the mighty Namoria limped ahead. She finally made it to a place that I can’t find on a map at about 3am. The crew went ashore, scrounged up the parts they needed and worked the rest of the night in the engine room. I went down to see them about 6:30am and the cook/mechanic had most of the engine disassembled on the floor. Within an hour we were moving again to the gloriously loud whiring sound of two healthy-ish diesel engines. After a full day making up time we finally made it to Komodo and parked the boat for the night. At dusk the boat was bum-rushed by several smaller boats that pulled up along-side us. My paranoid instinct told me they may be pirates. It still happens in these waters and anyone who spends any time here will inevitably hear stories of tourists being set-up to be robbed. But no, I was comforted to find they were just local villagers selling wooden carvings of Komodo Dragons, jewelry with little seashell etchings of Komodo Dragons, and sarongs printed with…you guessed it...more dragons!

On the last day we woke to the most beautiful sunrise I’d seen in a very long time. This was our day to see the infamous giant reptile only found on the island of Komodo and the neighboring Rinca Island. We were not disappointed. I’ve seen very large monitor lizards in Malaysia and Borneo, but Komodo Dragons are definitely the big bad Darwinian granddaddy of ‘em all.

It seems different people were promised different things on the trip: the 2 elderly couples were promised a bit more luxury than sleeping on the deck of a boat with 15 other people; the Dutch guy was told he could buy beer on board (you have to do it before departure); and the poor Americans were devastated when they departed only to find that 4 Swedish girls had NOT booked the trip. As far as we were concerned, it was pretty much exactly what we thought it would be – we’ve learned to read between the lines of a tour pitch. The crew was great. I don’t think I ever saw the cook/mechanic sleep. I think he is, without a doubt, the hardest working man in Indonesia! The first mate was amazing and for some reason he confided to me everything that was going on with the boat – I appreciated being aware of my destiny. And the boat; I fell in love with her, even though she had a bum ticker and her “newly rebuilt” engine was 9 years old, she was a real workhorse. With the storm, the rain and wind, the waves, engines conking out, the sun finally coming, and the dragons the trip was amazing – a real adventure that I would recommend it to everyone who wants to live a little.