Moving onto Flores

10th February 2011

We started horribly early at 6am with a sad breakfast of hard-boiled egg, feeble jam sandwich and water which had been left for us by the kind staff of Okawati because they don’t start breakfast until 7:30. I wouldn’t have bothered if I’d known that 1.5 hours later we’d be ensconced in a Starbucks at the airport with cinnamon buns and cake. That’s Bali for you. Of course, the cappuccino was still yucky and milky. That’s Starbucks for you.

Anyway, a four day break from driving around Bali beckoned and that was fine by me. Today found me jolly tired. I dozed in the departure lounge while we waited an extra half-hour for the flight. I zonked out as soon as we sat down on the plane, and didn’t wake up until our descent to Labuan Bajo on Flores an hour later. I managed to get through the 3 km drive to our hotel, Bajo Komodo EcoLodge, and through checking in and having lunch. Then I fell asleep in our room for three hours until it was time to head out for dinner.

Labuan Bajo reminds me much more of Madagascar or Cambodia than anywhere on Bali, which goes to show how unusual Bali is within Indonesia. LB is a small port town, dusty and ramshackle and basic, with only a tiny cluster of three tourist restaurants and several tour agents to cater for the dragon-ogling trade. We chose a local restaurant, but the locals inside were silent and grave, and the blinds were inexplicably lowered to make the interior as muggy as a sauna, so we changed our mind and stuck with the tourist crowd at The Lounge over the road. Ironically (or perhaps not) the pizza that Tim had was excellent while the bamboo-wrapped fish in local spice that I chose wasn’t very good at all.

Back at the hotel, I slept soundly.

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This entry was posted on Wednesday, February 16th, 2011 at 11:14 am and is filed under Indonesia. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.