Day 273: A Wildlife Extravaganza in Flores…And A Dock Mishap
It’s our guide Marino’s birthday today! How fun for him to spend it with the Sullivan family! Ha!
He picked us up at 8 and we drove the short distance to a boat waiting in the harbor.
It was an old wooden boat a bit like the river boat in the Amazon. One captain and two crew — none of whom spoke English but most of whom wore jean cutoffs.
First stop: An hour away to an island for snorkeling. The jury’s still out on snorkeling for our family. Teddy seems to rank it somewhere around “pretty neat.” I am scared of fish so it’s more therapy than pleasure for me. And the kids can’t/won’t use the breathing mask, so they mostly sit on the boat/dock waiting impatiently to move on to the next activity.
The dock we pulled up to had 3-4 other wooden dive boats there already but it was by no means crowded. We are feeling very far from …anything right now.
The dock was ancient and super rickety. It was also felt super high because it was low tide, and there were no railings anywhere. We’ll come back to this.
Teddy snorkeled way out with Marino’s sidekick/driver/helper, Jimmy. Jimmy reminds me of Maui from Moana.
After taking Willa and James out for minor spins near the dock with their own goggles, he came back for me and basically said I needed to see this.
Sigh.
I geared up and went out with them. I wore a life jacket because I was afraid of my back getting sunburned. I mention it because the whole time I was snorkeling, I was nervously clenching the front of the jacket (and making crying/dying cat sounds as I bit down hard on the breathing tube thing).
I hate fish.
But I’ll admit it was very cool. We saw gorgeous tropical varieties and miles of lovely coral. There’s a whole world down there.
Naturally, though, I was the first one to return back to the dock.
This is when the day took an interesting turn.
I swam up to the rickety wooden ladder and clung to it as I passed my fins and goggles up to Marino, who had been sitting on the dock with the kids.
While still down in the water, I saw a flash out of the corner of my right eye and heard Willa, up on the dock above me, gasp. In that split second I thought: “There’s no way that was James falling off the dock…was it?”
Just then to my right there was a huge splash and all I saw was James’s yellow banana baseball hat beneath the water.
He’d fallen about 5-6 feet off the high dock into the sea.
Right away he came to the surface and screamed as loud as he could. I scooped him over to me on the ladder and he clung there crying and catching his breath while he/I tried to make sense of it.
No one saw what happened except Willa, who vaguely said he was trying to move from point A to point B and lost his balance. James described the incident by saying simply: “I knew I was going to fall in.” We all know that point-of-no-return feeling.
He was totally fine, but this could have been really, really bad. First, he was lucky to fall into deep water — everywhere else around the dock the water was very, very shallow and filled with hard coral.
Second, according to Willa, he narrowly missed knocking his head on a wooden boat bow on his way down.
I hate to even think of these what-ifs. We were lucky it was just a splashy tumble and nothing more.
Whew.
Within minutes we were back on our boat, laughing and playing games. Willa recounted that she too had had a tumble: Apparently when she went to the beach to read Harry Potter on a lounger in the shade, she sat down and the whole lounge chair flipped backward up in the air and sent her little legs flying over her head. That got a chuckle.
Next was an hour and a half ride to an island where we would see real Komodo dragons living in the wild. The guys on the boat cooked us lunch – rice, fried eggplant, potato balls, barbecued tuna and watermelon. Simple and totally fine.
James and I had no Kindles and no games. Willa retired to a small bunk room to read (Harry Potter obsessed) while James and I played patty cake games and did funny accents.
As we pulled up to the Komodo dragon island we saw a herd of deer…on a tropical white sand beach…drinking turquoise saltwater. So bizarre. Turns out they drink seawater to keep their salt levels up, a lot like a salt lick.
Visitors dock and walk to the welcome center. You pay for the short, medium or long trek (we did medium) and get assigned a ranger. Our guy was soft-spoken, had pretty bad English and carried a long stick (I was hoping more for a machete or gun but whatever).
We didn’t know what to expect as we set out. This island apparently has three kinds of venomous snakes, including spitting cobras, and 1,049 Komodo dragons, all living in the wild. Komodos are massive, deadly prehistoric lizards. They lunge at prey like wild buffalo and horses, sink their venom in, and wait a week until the prey has died.
As we set out on the path with our guide, we immediately saw about seven Komodos, all lounging on the ground near the welcome center. Apparently it’s because there’s a kitchen nearby. One got up and made his way to a stream to get water. Seeing his forked tongue slurp up the water was fascinating/terrifying.
We continued on for nearly an hour, exploring the bush-like terrain. We saw one Komodo in a nest area, protecting her eggs. Yeesh.
When it was over, I was ready to get the hell out of there…
Our last stop was to a mangrove island about 30 minutes away where we anchored and waited for the sunset. Apparently there were going to be some giant flying foxes or something?
We didn’t get it or know what to expect. Teddy and I drank a beer while the kids used some fishing line and a hook to try to catch fish with Marino.
Eventually the sun went down and, sure enough, what looked like a flock of birds rose up out of the mangrove island and flew over and beyond us to another island in the distance. More and more filled the sky and the stream of these creatures flowed overhead. They were the flying foxes!! When you looked directly up and saw their silhouette, they looked like cartoon bat symbols straight out of Batman. This went on for 20 minutes. They just kept coming! It was a truly awesome display.
Oh speaking of awesome displays, I forgot to mention that while we were waiting for the foxes, we saw not one but two flying fish displays. Each time, about two dozen delicate flying fish would burst out of the water from a single point and each fly outward in a different direction, creating a flower effect in the water. So crazy.
Finally we were cruising back to Labuan Bajo, tired and ready for bed. James fell asleep on the bench while Willa read in the bunk room.
Our experience getting off the boat in the harbor…was…maybe not the safest thing we’ve done all year. Felt like we were stumbling from bobbing apple to bobbing apple in the pitch black water. We don’t need to talk about it or think about it ever again. We’re alive.
In a last bit of excitement for the day, our driver Jimmy noticed right away that his SUV had a flat in the parking lot. We wondered if we should hail a cab but he said no, just give him 5 minutes. I held my flashlight up while he lit up that tire change like a Formula One pit crew member. Very impressive.
We got some pizza from Made it Italy (Labuan Bajo strangely has a lot of Italians who’ve relocated there and opened amazing little restaurants) and crashed HARD.
MISC
This place is far from home. And it’s rustic and raw. Have a feeling it won’t be like this for long, but it was fun to see.
Our journey only gets more off the beaten path for the next 10 days or so as we fly east, deeper into the Flores province.
