Road Trip – Flores

With Maria still nursing her stingray-afflicted ankle, we depart Labuan Bajo and fly to Ende to begin our road trip through Flores. Our driver, Ardi, meets us at the airport. We drive through mountainous central Flores on winding roads.

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A bend in the river

Interspersed with rice paddies.

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Terraced rice

We stop at a village of the Lio people.

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Elevated platform for paying respect to ancestors
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Lio woman and grandchild
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Tomb of a Lio ancestor

The Lio people are keen woodcarvers. Ardi tells us that the carvings on a house are indicative of ‘economic activity’. We can see this regarding the cattle below…

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Carving, Lio house

…but are mystified by this lifelike pair of breasts carved into a doorpost.

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Carving, Lio house

We spend our first night in Moni. The main draw here is to watch the sun rise over the multicoloured lakes of the Kelimutu volcano. We rise and depart at 4:15 AM. It’s raining and foggy. As dawn breaks, visibility is zero. So it goes. This is what we would have seen.

We carry on. Of course, the sun breaks through eventually. We stop for lunch on Bluestone Beach, where the stones are indeed blue.

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Bluestone Beach
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Almost turquoise when wet
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It don’t mean a thing if it ain’t got that swing

We pass this volcano, Mt. Ebulobo. We’re always passing volcanoes here.

Smoking mountain

No surprise that Indonesia is the third most volcano-rich country on Earth.

And we visit the Malange thermal springs on the way to Bajawa.

In hot water

Overnight in Bajawa. In the morning we visit the village of Bena.

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Bena village
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Bena village, Mt. Inerie in the background

The village is interesting, but unbearably loud music drives us out within ten minutes. Seems the villagers are having a party in the evening. It is now about 8:00 AM. For some reason, bad music is blasting out of bad speakers somewhere at ear-splitting decibels. We flee.

We pass through Ardi’s home town. His wife invites us for coffee.

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Our driver Ardi, his wife Juliana, and their daughter

We continue to Ruteng, where we stay in a convent, the Convent of Santa Maria. It’s the cleanest place we’ve seen since Singapore.

We visit a local village at the edge of town.

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This place is more authentic, less of a tourist attraction than Bena. Locals play volleyball in front of the Mound of the Ancestors.

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Your serve, granddad

We drive back to Labuan Bajo the next day. We pass these unique rice fields planted in a spider-web pattern.

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Does whatever a spider can…

They’re yellow rather than emerald green because the rice has just been harvested.

Sight or Insight of the Day – Flores Road Trip

One of the most memorable places we visit is the ‘hobbit’ cave, where a ‘new species‘ of human is discovered.

This was global news of the ‘Where were you when ‘X‘ happened?’ level in 2004. I remember being at my desk and reading online ‘Breaking story – remains of new human species discovered on Indonesian island’. I suspect the media loved the hobbit connection.

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Liang Bua cave
Inside Liang Bia cave

Quote from Wikipedia:

‘The specimens were discovered on the Indonesian island of Flores in 2003 by a joint Australian-Indonesian team of archaeologists looking for evidence of the original human migration of Homo sapiens from Asia to Australia. They were not expecting to find a new species, and were surprised at the recovery of a nearly complete skeleton of a hominin they dubbed LB1 because it was unearthed inside the Liang Bua Cave.’

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The exact site of LB1’s discovery

The site is a working archaeological dig. If we hadn’t arrived on a Sunday morning, the place would’ve been rife with eggheads.

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Please don’t touch the rocks

Not everyone would be as thrilled to come here. There’s not much to see.  But with a bit of imagination, there is a sense of history being made. And it’s probably a good thing that visitors are rare.