BAJAWA, FLORES, INDONESIA
At 5:00 this morning, I found myself halfway up the side of a mountain, standing in a pitch-dark parking lot, with a cup of coffee in one hand and a pancake in the other, listening to Alan Jackson blaring from our driver's Toyota Kijang. Only in Indonesia....
We were there to see Flores' main attraction, the colored lakes of Mt. Kelimutu. Supposedly they're best viewed at dawn, so we left Moni at 4am, drove most of the way up the mountain, and then climbed the final 20 minutes to the top to look down upon three volcanic lakes, colored black, brown, and green from various minerals in the water. (Strangely, the lakes keep changing their color--a few years ago, they were red, blue, and green.) It was a little overcast, so the sunrise was less than spectacular, but as the dawn broke I was just grateful to be able to see all three lakes, as they're often completely obscured by clouds.
We returned to our hotel for breakfast, and then zig-zagged west through high mountains, terraced rice fields, villages, and thousands of banana trees, coconut palms, and stands of giant bamboo. We stopped to take pictures at several points of interest, including the blue stone beach near Ende, where the locals gather and sort pastel-blue and purple beach stones for export (they're used in landscaping), and the traditional village of Bena, featuring high thatched-roof huts and weirdly angular stone altars.
We eventually made it to the hill town of Bajawa, where we found a room at the Hotel Korina, ate dinner at the Lucas Restaurant next door, and somehow ended up in an impromptu singalong outside our hotel with a few guitar-playing locals and some visiting French Canadians, getting drunk on arak (palm wine) and belting out tunes by John Denver and CCR.
Lord, what's become of me? :-)
At 5:00 this morning, I found myself halfway up the side of a mountain, standing in a pitch-dark parking lot, with a cup of coffee in one hand and a pancake in the other, listening to Alan Jackson blaring from our driver's Toyota Kijang. Only in Indonesia....
We were there to see Flores' main attraction, the colored lakes of Mt. Kelimutu. Supposedly they're best viewed at dawn, so we left Moni at 4am, drove most of the way up the mountain, and then climbed the final 20 minutes to the top to look down upon three volcanic lakes, colored black, brown, and green from various minerals in the water. (Strangely, the lakes keep changing their color--a few years ago, they were red, blue, and green.) It was a little overcast, so the sunrise was less than spectacular, but as the dawn broke I was just grateful to be able to see all three lakes, as they're often completely obscured by clouds.
We returned to our hotel for breakfast, and then zig-zagged west through high mountains, terraced rice fields, villages, and thousands of banana trees, coconut palms, and stands of giant bamboo. We stopped to take pictures at several points of interest, including the blue stone beach near Ende, where the locals gather and sort pastel-blue and purple beach stones for export (they're used in landscaping), and the traditional village of Bena, featuring high thatched-roof huts and weirdly angular stone altars.
We eventually made it to the hill town of Bajawa, where we found a room at the Hotel Korina, ate dinner at the Lucas Restaurant next door, and somehow ended up in an impromptu singalong outside our hotel with a few guitar-playing locals and some visiting French Canadians, getting drunk on arak (palm wine) and belting out tunes by John Denver and CCR.
Lord, what's become of me? :-)
People met today:
- Henrik from Sweden, just finishing a year of studying in Singapore, and traveling for several weeks in Indonesia. Chris and I met him at Lake Kelimutu this morning, but I also recognized him from the airport at Denpasar a couple of days ago (there aren't too many western travelers to Flores).
posted by John Kuge at 7:24 PM
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