Across the Heart of Darkness

So if you read the blog last, we finished a long, shaky (and yet awesome) boat trip past Komodo Island and some of Eastern Indonesia. We were on the western side of the large island of Flores (100 miles) across. Our flight left for Manila in a few days, but we flew out on the Eastern side of the island. How hard can it be to travel 100 miles? How hard could it be to build a canal across Panama? The answer to both these timeless questions turned out to be the same: “Pretty damn hard.”

pictures that don't really prove it

We sat in the less-then-desirable-town of Labuan Baju reading our Lonely Planet about how terrible the roads and busses were on this island. A bus actually pulled up right next to where we were eating. Great! A young lad, clinging to the outside, promptly leaned over and vomited. Not so great. Bus = not an option.

4 of us decided to hire a driver and an SUV type vehicle to drive us across over a few days. So 3 Americans, one Swiss, one crazy-ass driver set off through the wilderness armed with several karaoke tapes, Carlos Santana, and the Backstreet Boys. Things were bound to be awesome.

Windy roads would be an understatement. The back seat was considered blissful, because at least you didn’t have to watch certain death awaiting you around the next blind curve. Our driver Matt, assured us this was normal. Not overly encouraging, but at least he had lived this long.

He took us to a rural home of a woman distilling Arak: fermented coconut milk, distilled so as to become jet fuel. Whilst the process of this was fascinating, I would rather drink tequila w/ tomato juice, and that’s saying a lot.

We stopped for two nights in the town of Mony (yes, just like the song, “Mony, Mony”). We stayed with Matt’s brother, Bryan. We got to experience some kick ass things like a natural hot springs in a rice paddy and these 3 crazy volcanic crater lakes (the chameleon lakes, all different colors). What was especially bizarre was that when we returned for the 2nd night, a drum set and guitars all appeared, so we rocked out. I played the drum set with actual sticks ripped off a tree. It was classic. I also tried to drink Arak. Ugly stuff. The best part about our lodging was they had a dumbbell set like Marky-Mark used in the video “Good Vibrations”

We somehow made it alive across Flores in time for our flight. Granted, no one knew if it would actually take off or not, nor when. We just hung out at the airport all day. They had a metal detector, but it wasn’t plugged in. Eventually a plane showed up, and some nice man decided to let us get on.

We flew to our new home in Manila.