Komodo Report, one more time Thu, 11 Jan 2001 From: "Robert Donlan" <robertdonlan@hotmail.com> 

First of all, let me make one thing as clear as I can. I have no regrets about taking the Komodo journey and though there are some things I would like to have been different, I have no complaints. These are just going to be my muddled remembrances and recalled reactions to a strange journey with some wonderful people across a beautiful part of our watery planet. 

When I first heard about the trip I misunderstood. I thought it was going to be a 4 day trek through the steaming jungle, and I was already steaming quite enough, thank you very much. When I discovered that it was a four day boat trip with a few hours checking out the dragons, I tried to sign up but they told me there weren't enough people for the trip, they weren't going to be doing any more trips till after the rainy season, and transportation back at the end of the trip would be a problem because so many Muslims would be traveling at the end of Ramadan. Well, they had more people wanting to take the trip, and I guess they couldn't pass up a fat payday, so they scheduled one more and I was signed on.  I'm so glad I did. 

I started my part of the journey by leaving Gili Trawangan where I had spent 10 days. I originally thought I'd stay there for 3 or 4, but it was such an easy place to be and my cottage had a hammock and I had a bunch of good books. So the time just kind of slid along. 

From Trawangan back to Lomboc was an easy 45 minute boat ride and the sea was calm. At Bangsal on Lomboc the group started gathering and we boarded a van for our 45 or 50 mile ride across Lomboc from west to east. The first half hour or so we rode along the coast and it is as pretty a stretch of coast that I have seen.  White sand, tall coconut palms, pretty water, lovely little fishing villages with outrigger fishing boats pulled up on the shore. Simply lovely. I think they may have taken the travel poster photos for Bali right there on Lomboc. And as we rode along I could look over across the water to Bali and see that perfectly shaped volcano, Gunung Agung looming above the island with just a band of white cloud striped across it near the top. More travel poster material. 

The van itself was another matter. It was designed for Indonesian midgets, but it was stuffed full of well fed Westerners. I couldn't even sit facing the front of the van because my legs didn't fit between the seats. Maybe that was a sign of some sort.  But Lomboc is pretty and we journeyed past lovely rice terraces that looked like they were designed by a landscapre architect who put the beautiful tall palms in all the right places. We had to stop in Mataran to pick up some more passengers and make some other arrangements, and I took the opportunity to buy some chocolate bars and some nuts and some cookies....comfort foods for the trip and New Year's Eve treats. Mataran is a noisey, dusty, busy city filled with people who don't seem to smile much. It gave me bad vibes, and I was glad to leave it. We passed through other small towns along the way, some Muslim with mosques and some Hindu with temples, more easygoing people, and lots of dogs. The Muslims don't like dogs and you don't see them in Muslim towns. I'm told they consider dogs to be filthy animals and that bad Muslims come back as dogs in the next life. But they do seem to like cats. 

I don't remember the name of the port we sailed from, but when we arrived there were a bunch of dock workers unloading a big sailing cargo boat. Big sacks of this and that and some huge timbers that looked mighty heavy. They did it all by hand. No machinery at all.  As we loaded our gear on board and sat on the boat waiting for clearance to leave the harbor, a bunch of young men came to the edge of the pier and hunkered down and just watched us, staring. We got stared at a lot on the trip.
 We were, after all, a boatload of Western white skins. At first the staring unnerved me a bit, but it was only curiosity and something to do for the idle. 

Once the Bintang and sodas were on ice and we left the dock, the delightful process began of getting to know the rest of the band of merry voyagers.  There were 16 of us and a crew of 4 or 5. We had 2 Brits, 2 Aussies, 2 South Africans, 2 French, 3 Germans, 1 Irishman, and 4 Yanks, 3 from Colorado. So we had 8 different varieties of English and it was fun to listen to. It really was for me like a kind of music at times. I liked it. And the people were from different places and did different kinds of work and were on interesting trips of their own. A very congenial group, amazingly congenial and adaptive actually. 

Our boat was not affiliated with the Princess Cruise Lines. It looked a bit like Bubba's shrimp boat from "Forrest Gump."  Only it was much smaller. I think 8 or 10 would have been the appropriate number of travellers for a boat of that size. The navigation equipment was not high tech. Not even mezzo-tech.  No compass. No charts. No radio. Only a steering wheel and an on/of switch. The running lights were one green and one red on the side of the wheel house and a string of Christmas lights on the rigging. The lifeboat (lifeboat?) was a small Indonesian sized dugout canoe with one short paddle. There were some life jackets stored safely in the hold. And a couple long ropes. 

The bathroom was a little bigger than a phone booth and it consisted of a hole in the floor. Fortunately it was walled off so that we could cling to some small shred of dignity when Nature called. The sewage disposal/treatment system was about six feet of air between the hole in the deck and the water below. The bathing facilities were the sea around us. The kitchen adjoined the toilet room and formed a totally inelegant kitchen/bathroom "suite."  The cooking was done over a gas fired cooking ring, and I was always glad to know that the food had been thoroughly boiled or fried because anything that needed to be sliced or peeled was done on the floor. Some people claimed to have seen the kitchen staff slicing things while holding them down on the floor with their feet. That may have been hyperbole.  Maybe not. There was a good bit of hyperbole going around.  The kitchen floor did get sluiced down with sea water regularly. The water was dipped up by a tin pale tied to a length of rope. Unfortunately it was dipped right alongside the hole in the bathroom floor.  I think most of us tried to avert our eyes when we walked through that area. Actually, we didn't really walk through it; it only took about three steps. That area of the boat was a don't ask, don't tell, don't linger, don't look area. 

I just now heard a rooster crow, and it reminds me that the days on the boat were the first days since I landed in Denpasar that I didn't hear roosters at all hours of the day or night. 

Are you having tropical rain storms where you are right now? In the last week I've experienced the longest and fiercest cloudbursts ever. Like standing under a firehose for two hours. The rains rattle the big-leafed foliage till it sounds like a constant surf roar. I can only imagine what it would have been like if we had that kind of rain on the boat trip. Yikes!!! We surely would have gotten to know one another in a whole new way. The portion of deck that we lived on for 4 days and nights was sheltered by a plastic tarp stretched across some kind of rigging. The tarp provided some shade, but it wouldn't have been a lot of help in the rain. Perhaps a real rain such as I'ved experienced the last few days would have shredded the tarp I think. 

Our sleeping area would semi-comfortably accommodate perhaps 8. We had double that number. Some people slept on the roof and some slept up on the foredeck. "Foredeck" we mariners call it...you know the place where Kate Winslet and whatzizname got it on on the Titanic. The first night I got the last thin sleeping pad and the last tiny space on the deck. The pad was OK, but the space was so small that I couldn't stretch out fully without my feet going up over the edge of the deck. I didn't sleep very well at all. I did watch some stars and I did read about 30 pages of my Stephen King novel by flashlight. There was some healthy snoring during the night. In fact, some misguided souls told me they thought I did some of the snoring, but that's impossible because I never snore. Not even once. Not me. Not ever. 

One night Patrick from Ireland came up with a good plan. He put his sleeping pad inside the canoe that was lashed on the foredeck. Good idea until the sea got rough and started crashing over the sides of the boat and turned Patrick's lovely bed into a bath tub. The rough seas must have been on the 3rd night or so because by then I was plenty tired or partially sleep deprived because I slept right through the storm and didn't know it happened until I was told about it the next day.  I think that was the night that I woke up about 3 or so and sat up and watched the stars and watched as we encountered a string of about 50 fishing boats strung in a line with their work lights on. Quite a sight. The captain slowed our boat down a bit and we threaded our way through them without snagging any nets or lines. 

The next morning when I awoke, we had pulled in to a little fishing community.  I call it a community, but there were no structures on the island. It was just a place where the fishing boats anchored during the day, lashed to one another for safer mooring and to allow the fishermen to go from boat to boat for visits or for business. While we were there, the fishermen were sleeping or resting or playing cards or doing chores....or watching us, just staring until I'd wave and then they'd smile and wave back. They liked having their pictures taken too. I wish I'd had a Polaroid instant camera. I surely could have traded photos for fish. It was interesting to me how popular Bob Marley is in that part of the world. I often saw young men wearing Bob Marley shirts, red and green and black with that great face and those dreadlocks. One of the fishing boats sported a nice big Bob Marley flag. Someone later told me that he thought Bob Marley was born on Flores Island. In any case, it was always a bit of a kick for me to see some young fisherman going about his work, decked out in the Rastaman's likeness. 

It was that little fishing encampment where Sean from Australia came to the rescue of our menu. He bought two huge snappers and gave them to the cook.  These were huge fish. Joe, our funny little "recreation director" guy on the crew, our "tour director," could hardly hold up the two fish, one in each hand, for long enough for me to take his picture. The kitchen crew scaled the fish with big knives about the size of machetes. They didn't scrape the scales off, that hacked them off. Maybe that's when they were holding the food down with their feet. In any case, the fish was delicious.  And it was the first break in our regular menue of pineapple or banana pancakes for breakast, noodles and/or rice and stir-boiled vegetables and fresh pineapple for lunch and dinner. On one occasion the captain paddled off in the canoe one night when we were anchored and we all hoped he was going to come back with Bintang, ice, and ganja.  No such luck. He came back with a big squid that he caught and which ended up in the next meal. The cookies and candy that I and others brought on board took care of our sweet tooth needs. 

Now for THE NEARDEATH EXPERIENCE. Just before getting to Komodo we anchored off shore from a lovely beach and a beautifully healthy reef. We all jumped in and swam to shore, some hanging out on the beach, some snorkelling. When we tried to get back out to the boat, maybe 75 meters from the beach, we discovered there was one hell of a current. I think Sandy discovered the current first and when she couldn't get back to the boat one of the crew went after her in the "lifeboat."  I didn't see the incident but I think that the guy couldn't paddle the canoe back to the boat against the current either, so they had to throw out a line for him. About that time others were getting pushed past the boat and were clinging to the life lines. I was snorkeling and didn't see all this going on. I just noticed that every time I looked up to see where the boat was, I was facing in a direction I didn't intend. Rob from South Africa called out to me to grab the line. I did and then the real fun started. The guys on the boat started hauling in the line so hard and fast that my body acted like a diving plane and the harder they pulled the deeper under my body wanted to go. So I had to hang on with one hand and try to kick and paddle with one hand to keep my head above water.  It may have taken only about ten minutes or so, but it sure seemed like a hell of a lot longer and I did have thoughts, fleeting notions, that I might not be able to hang on till they got me to the boat. I was pretty damned pooped when I did reach the boarding ladder.  And the current had twisted up the ladder so that it was hanging sideways in the water.  Once I grabbed on, I knew I was OK and I wasn't about to let go, but I needed some strong arms to help pull me up far enough so that I could grab the deck rail. So our refreshing little pre-Komodo dip turned into something none of us had counted on and probably few of us will forget real soon. 
 It was a subdued bunch of adventurers once we did a head count and made sure everyone was accounted for.  Then I broke out the chocolate bars and the Bintang got passed around and our energies were sufficiently stoked to visit the dragons. 

A nice slow-walking Indonesian guide took us on a little hike and we saw some dragons and they were bigger, uglyer, and slower moving than we were. I didn't find it all that exciting. A bit of a let down in fact. But I can now say that I've seen the dragons.  Some facts: a 130 lb. dragon can eat a 120 lb dear in one sitting.  The young dragons live in the trees till they are five or so or the big dragons would eat them.  Dragons live for about 60 years and when they die, the other dragons eat them. 

The dragons were far less interesting to me than were the flying fish or the flying foxes. One night we saled for miles through a big school of flying fish. For an hour or so there were always 50 or more of them skimming over the water and skipping off the surface, sometimes making leaps that had to be 25 feet or so in length. And they sparkled because we were going through a section of the sea that was filled with that phosphorescent plankton.  It was really amazing. I was awed for sure. 

The flying foxes are a type of bat.  Huge bats.  Bats that looked about the size ravens on steroids. There wing span was probably two and a half feet.  It was just getting on toward dusk and we were anchored off a heavily treed shore and the bats started migrating from a cave or hillside that was over on the next island or at least it was out of sight from where we were.  First there were a few, then a few dozen, then a few hundred and then thousands.  They just kept coming and coming and coming and coming.  Then a few started flying over the boat and the batwing design was real clear.  It was like something out of Hitchcock. Wild! I liked the bats and the flying fish better than I liked the dragons. 

New Year's Eve was rather tame. We were all pretty tired, but there was some excitement when someone brought out a bunch of rockets. One of the crew was a deaf mute and he wanted to fire off some rockets, handheld like the other guys were doing it. Only he'd never done it before and couldn't hear the instructions and he ended up hanging on to the rockets until they blew up as he held the stick.  No damage was done and we all had some laughs.  That, a Bintang toast, and some chocolate candy was our big celebration. 

After Komodo, we put in to our final port at Labuan Bajo on the western tip of the Island of Flores. Labuan Bajo.
 Say it out loud. Isn't it a great sounding name. It is a cute little dusty port town, but once we left the boat we all hustled to find accomodations, some cold beers, and especially showers to wash off four days of salt and grime. That evening we all met at a little restaurant where we had dinner together, shared a bunch of laughing reminiscences, and warm feelings. It was a candle light dinner because all the power in the town had gone out. Not an uncommon occurence in my experience in Indonesia. When the restaurant ran out of Bintang, it was definitely a sign that the trip was over. 

The good ship Bubba Gump had its charms, its failings, and its peculiarities, many of which I'll long remember. But the wonderful shipmates enriched me in ways I haven't yet fully realized, and I'll remember them for as long as I remeber the bats and the flying fish and the dragons and the near death experience and the warm Bintang. 

Smooth sailing and happy trails my friends. 

--------------------------------------------------------- --------------