Here there be dragons

I barely know where to begin with a post about Indonesia. I saw incredible wildlife, both on land and underwater, made great friends, and experienced a wonderful and varied culture. I did all this by visiting only five out of thousands of Indonesian islands. I would follow the rule “when in doubt, begin at the beginning”, but that’s just so boring. So instead, I’ll start with Christmas Eve, which serves as a perfect snapshot of my time in Indonesia.

A very slow, very grumpy, prehistoric beast

Mantas! Be prepared for a lot of manta photos, because I love them and I saw a lot of them

Labuanbajo harbor, looking back from the way out to Komodo

I started Christmas Eve by rolling out of my $4.50/night bed in the shared room above the dive shop and walking downstairs to meet the other divers - all 4 of them - before walking 10 minutes down the main street in Labuanbajo, on Flores Island. After an hour-and-a-half boat trip through beautiful green islands and clear blue water, we had two spectacular dives in Komodo National Park where we saw manta rays, sharks, octopus, huge schools of fish, dolphins, and some of the healthiest coral reefs in the world. My dive buddies were from the UK (living in Singapore), Argentina (living in London), Germany, and my guide was Indonesian. That evening, I went out for drinks and snacks with the Italian dive shop owners before going to listen to Catholic mass given in Bahasa Indonesian at an overflowing cathedral in the rain. The day finally wrapped up with a delicious cheeseburger - my first in months - with locals and guests from six different countries. My entire time in Indonesia felt like this one day: adventurous, laid-back, unexpected, refreshing, and all-around enjoyable.

Lionfish

Just look at that! Isn't it beautiful?

One of the toughest photos I've ever tried to take. The crab is about 2 inches long and trying to hide on a moving anemone, while I was being pushed around by the current. Not a perfect photo, but I'm still proud of it

My reason for going to Indonesia, as I've mentioned before, was to see Komodo dragons on their home turf, which is pretty funny considering that activity only occupied about 3 hours out of 15 days. Seeing the dragons was still a high point, but it certainly wasn't the most memorable portion of the trip; the dragons are impressive and slightly unnerving to see up close (especially when you don’t notice them along the path), but I think the people I met and the dives I did will stick with me for far longer.

They don't look all that threatening until you see one coming toward you while you're kneeling down. Then they look pretty scary

Fish cleaning the manta's belly, just like a manta day spa

Can you find the leaf fish? Here's a hint: it's the yellow blob

Although I entered and left the country via Bali, I don’t really have much to say about that island. I only stayed for a couple of days there total, and didn't really get out of the more developed areas, which have lost most of the “local charm” at the expense of all the tourists that go there. Moving east, I took the slow ferry to Lombok, next door to Bali, which was much more enjoyable and scenic, although they too are pushing very hard to increase tourism there. As I've said about buses and trains, the slow ferries are a great way to see how the locals get around on islands and take the time to enjoy the ride. It was funny to see how hard I was being sold the tourist fast ferries, at double the cost of the slow ferry, and how puzzled the local tour agents were that I wasn't interested in how fast and comfortable the speedboats were. Instead, I got to relax on deck, people-watch, and listen to The Pogues “Fairytale of New York”, which showed up on my Spotify playlist unexpectedly and was a good reminder that Christmas was later that week, and that somewhere in the world it was snowing and freezing cold - things like that make me appreciate my travels just that much more.

2 dragons sleeping outside park ranger quarters. Apparently, a few months before, a dragon "wandered into" a park office and bit two rangers. Not a place to let your guard down

One of the more colorful nudibranches (sea slugs) in Komodo

UFO!

I was heading to Lombok to pick up the tour boat that would eventually take me through the Komodo National Park to my final destination on Flores Island. This is a good point to say that travel within and between islands is widely available in Indonesia, but it’s rarely quick or easy. Most of the islands have an airport or two, but beyond that, you’re likely to be on a ferry or bus or both for many, many, many hours to get between towns. For example, the cheap option to get between Flores and the Bali airport was a 30+ hour ferry-bus-ferry-bus-ferry-bus trip that would only cost you about $20, if you could stand it. That’s why I was happy to find the Perama tour, a combination ferry and tour that took a leisurely 3 days to cruise between Lombok and Flores, with occasionally stops for snorkeling, fresh meals prepared on board, a private bunk, and a morning hike on Komodo Island to see the dragons. What made the trip especially nice was how many people on the tour who stayed on Flores, which provided a nice social transition from one place to the next. Also nice was the smooth cruising weather we had and the beautiful beaches we stopped on.

Another photo I'm pretty proud of, given the equipment - a transparent shrimp less than an inch long, on an anemone

A ray, trying to ignore all the noisy divers around it

Getting friendly with the mantas

I made it to see the Komodo dragons on two occasions, once on the Perama tour and once as part my dive day, and they are incredible animals to see up close. First off, this isn't one of those places that you hunt all over the park hoping you'll be able to spot a glimpse of the animals (like a tiger). The dragons are all over the visitor's center grounds, sleeping under the buildings, walking around the trails, and just generally reminding you to pay attention to your surroundings. They aren't particularly threatening, but they are big and territorial, and I don't think they would hesitate to take a bite at you just as a defense. The problem is that their mouths are so full of bacteria that a simple bite can kill you if you don't get a full antibiotic treatment (available on another island) soon after. To see so many of them laying around the park headquarters was a little funny, until you see them get up and walk around, which is when you suddenly realize you're looking at an 8-foot long lizard that makes you think of dinosaurs, and could probably move a lot quicker than you think it could, and it starts to get a little unnerving. However, with a couple of rangers at the front and rear of the group, you also can relax enough to notice that the Komodo Islands are truly beautiful places and worth seeing on their own.

I hope no one needs that antiperspirant back, because I am not going to get it for them

The intro to a traditional Indonesian fighting dance. Our tour stopped at a local festival on Lombok and they basically put the whole event on hold so our group could see some local theater before we had to leave

Rinca Island, the smaller of the two main islands in Komodo National Park

As good as it was to see the dragons and see another major animal on my checklist, the attractions under water were just as impressive. Komodo is also a marine protected area and the coral reefs around the islands are simply stunning. It is a toss up if the reefs in Borneo were healthier, but both places had forests of coral, huge schools of reef fish, and some incredible marine life. My favorite site was Manta Point (surprise!), which we went to three times, and each time it just got better and better, with mantas making circling passes at cleaning stations, buzzing by the divers, and swimming in big barrel rolls as they fed on the plankton. If air wasn't an issue, I could watch them swim for hours, and it's amazing to see how graceful they are and how they can hang almost motionless in a strong current, or move around the reef with barely a twitch of their wings. And when there weren't mantas around, there were tiny fish, eels, shrimp, and nudibranches to keep my interest until the next big ray appeared.

The dance fighting performance, which seemed to involve a lot more serious fighting than I would have guessed. There was a serious chance of injury if one of the fighters stepped into a blow, but luckily they seemed to know what they were doing

Up close with a turtle on the reef

Good advice, considering that dragon is sitting on her nest

I ended up staying much longer than I originally planned in Labuanbajo, partly because the diving was so great, partly because it was so inexpensive and laid-back, but mostly because the people I met there were so friendly and fun. During a trip where I have spent large chunks of time traveling by myself, Indonesia was remarkable because I had about two solid weeks of social diving, dining, and exploring with a great group of people from all over the world, and it made all the experiences I had come for, like seeing the dragons and the reefs, all the better because I got to share them. So, needless to say, I was a little grumpy for a few days after leaving because I wanted to keep that vibe going, which is pretty tough to do when everyone I met (as well as myself) was getting on intercontinental flights in all directions. However, I'm happy to say that I got over my moping, got excited about seeing Australia, and met a whole new group of awesome people down under. Apparently, as I'm discovering, the world is just full of interesting people, and I'm looking forward to meeting them all!

My only picture (so far) of an octopus on the reef!

Traffic jam at the cleaning station

Also from Manta Point, a ribbon eel. They try to look fierce, but they are only about a foot long, and they have these ridiculous nose flaps that make them very hard to take seriously

OK, that was all I had to say about my time in Indonesia, but I still have a lot more pictures, so I guess I will post those separately in a couple of days so you don't get manta overdose. Also, I did manage to take some video footage of a few dolphins that showed up on a dive and I've uploaded it to YouTube (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-eI27dShlRk). Just a minute long and a little shaky, but proof that I've been diving with dolphins! I told you it was an incredible place.

The Green Savannas of India

Kazaringa National Park is located in Assam, way up in northeast India, up in that part that looks like it’s being pinched off by Bangladesh and Myanmar, and it felt completely different from the rest of India I visited. Well, maybe not completely different - the traffic was still scary and the cities were still too noisy, crowded, and dirty - but it was cooler, greener, and full of tea plantations, and the local residents definitely have the look of central Asia. Odd that I didn't realize it until I saw someone holding a “to Bhutan” sign at the airport, I was only a few hundred kilometers from the Nepal and Bhutan borders in Assam, and it gave a different flavor to the area.

Elephant? I don't see any elephant. She must be hiding in the tall grass.

This little guy was the camp puppy, who was very good at begging at the table, avoiding attempts to shut him out from begging at the table, and getting scared by every sudden movement or noise. Also, being adorable.

Black-necked storks, which I also saw in Australia

Is he trying to hide behind that clump of grass?

Once again, it was a relief to get out of the city and on the way to the village where I would be staying, on the boundary of the National Park. As I mentioned in the last post, I wanted to visit Kaziranga to double up on my chances of seeing a tiger in India, but they also have some of the highest populations of one-horned rhinos in India, as well as elephants, and it’s a birding hot spot as well. I didn't glimpse a tiger there, but I saw dozens of rhinos and elephants and just generally enjoyed a relaxing few days cruising around in a jeep and looking at wildlife. I stayed in a tent cabin in another eco-camp, which was quiet, cozy, and only a few minutes from the park entrances. And just like every other place I stayed in India, the food was amazing and plentiful; every meal I said there was no way I would be able to finish everything, and yet by the end I was faced with a table full of empty serving dishes.

A very lucky moment: a mother and older calf walked out onto the road just behind our jeep.

I would not want to be a water buffalo. Just imagine trying to walk around carrying those horns all day.

I didn't see a tiger in Kaziranga, but we did find several tiger tracks in the mud

The only other points I’ll make are 1) rhinos are extreme funny-looking up close, 2) if you ever have the chance to get to India, visit Kaziranga, it’s everything a national park should be, and 3) while I was there, I couldn't stop thinking “This place looks exactly like a green version of an African savanna”, which is funny, because I've never seen an African savanna in person. It’s definitely a danger of long-term travel that places begin to look the same (that’s certainly the case for me now in major cities everywhere), but I find it more amusing when my brain decides someplace reminds me of somewhere I've never been. I've been thinking of this as the “ghostly” effect - “ghostly” being a word referring to something I've never seen, yet I use it to describe something I’m seeing. And that’s your meta, overly-analyzed thought for the day.

Late afternoon on the lake

A lovely African, I mean Indian, savanna

A pair of hornbills

India, Part II (Part 1) - The Sundarbans

When I was growing up, I was addicted to nature documentaries. Nothing would catch my attention while channel-surfing quicker than hearing David Attenborough’s voice or the phrase “...soon, the [insert poor helpless creature here]’s struggle were over.” Even these days, I still find Blue Planet and Planet Earth to be some of the best shows on TV in years. Places featured in these shows, like the Galapagos Islands, the Sundarban swamps, and Borneo, seemed as remote and wild as any place on Earth, almost mythical. So when I started thinking about what I really wanted to do while traveling, and I realized that I had the time and resources to get almost anywhere I wanted, I decided that I wanted to see some of these wild places up close, to live like I was in a nature documentary. I came up with a list of places that are most recognizable in the canon of wildlife shows, what animals I wanted to see in the wild, and started plotting my routes to intersect. I've been incredibly lucky in that so far, I've visited all of the places and seen all of the animals I've been looking for, but it’s not quite been the same experience I was expecting. Like I've said before, what’s a once-in-a-lifetime experience for me is simply daily life for a lot of people and what seems like a legendary far-off destination on TV is a daily tour site when you get closer.

Before I get into the specifics of the trip to the Sundarbans, I’ll also mention that while volunteering in the Maldives, a documentary film crew from China came to film whale sharks, and watching the filming and hearing about other times film crews have been there was a real eye-opener. Even as a kid, I could recognize that nature documentaries were edited and assembled; clips were re-used, places didn't match up, and in some cases, I could tell different animals were portrayed as the same one. However, seeing the level of staging going on in the Maldives, and the level to which a script was followed was entertaining. Even the premise of the show, trying to “find out and film” if whale sharks would feed at night, was already well-known to the locals. In some of ways, nature shows are about as “documentary” as reality TV shows, but with less cursing and tattoos.

One of the major goals of going India was to see a tiger, which I didn't manage in September, so I really wanted to go back and try again. In addition to the India and Bangladesh’s Sundarbans, the world’s largest mangrove swamp, I also found out that there was an amazing national park called Kaziranga in Assam, in India’s north-east regions, which had both tigers and one-horned Asian rhinos, so decided I would try to visit both and increase my chances to see a wild tiger - something everyone agrees is not an easy task even in India. I flew into Calcutta, now called Kolkata, booked my 3 day tour to the Sundarban national park, and gritted my teeth through the time before I could leave. Kolkata makes Mumbai look clean and organized in comparison and I won’t say much more about it other than I will happily sleep in a hut with mosquitoes and no electricity than in downtown Kolkata...in fact, that’s exactly what I did.

Rice fiends in the Sundarban at harvest time

River cruise tour boats in the morning

The tour was excellent and run by a trio of young Indian men who obviously really care about the Sundarbans and giving their guests an authentic rural Indian experience, but getting to the start of that experience was quite a journey in itself. My group (four Germans in their 60s and 70s, a Brit, and four Indian engineering students taking a break after exams) loaded into a van and drove two and a half hours out of Kolkata. The first hour is nothing but tent slums, landfills, rivers black with sewage and tannery waste, and smog, but thankfully after that the air begins to clear and the villages get more spread out and picturesque. It was round about this time that our driver, who had been driving aggressively even by India’s standards, clipped a construction truck while passing and took a piece off our rear bumper. This was a major issue because, while I have found Indians to be warm welcoming wonderful people in almost every way, you do not (NOT!) want to be involved in a traffic accident in India. Within two seconds of pulling over, the construction truck had pulled in front and cut us off, five men got out and started yelling. Within one minute of stopping, there were about 20 people surrounding the vehicles (which was amazing, because we had been on an empty road), and from there, it got fairly ugly. Almost everyone was yelling and gesturing, everyone was showing off the damages, and the construction crew was preventing our driver from getting back into the van. The worst point came when the other driver reached into his truck and came back with a length of metal rebar, which he brandished at our driver as if he was going to hit him in the head. As you might imagine, the 10 of us in the bus were trying to decide if we were ever going to make it, if were going to see a mob fight break out, and whether it was better or worse to stay in the van or leave. Finally, thankfully, after about 15 minutes of yelling and arguing and more people arriving to get the story and people obviously trying to broker some sort of peace, the whole thing suddenly broke up and our driver got back in and we left - leaving me still wishing I had a translation of the whole experience. Not knowing the language is one thing, but not knowing any of the social cues and body language means it was impossible for me to know if this was the equivalent of Italian conversational gesturing or if the driver was at serious risk of being assaulted, which about as lost in translation as I've felt since I left the States.

The walk down to the tour boat dock

Macaques searching for food in the mud

After that excitement, we continued driving (more conservatively, I’m happy to say) for about 2 hours to a small riverside village where we took our luggage and boarded an open ferry boat for 20 minutes to cross the river to another village… where we got on tricycle rickshaws for another 20 minute ride over broken roads… to get on another open ferry boat to take us for another 20 minute ride to get to the village… which we finally arrived at after another 10 minute walk from the dock. “Getting away from it all” certainly applied after all this, but it really was worth all the travel when we got to a beautiful camp in a local village on the river’s edge, with no mobile service and no electricity, just great views, friendly locals, and amazing food. We spent two nights here, listening to local musicians, getting up incredibly early to go on river cruises, and walking through the village having translated conversations with the locals. My favorite quote came from a women from the village who told the Brit that she loved her blonde hair and wanted to go to England “for a month” so her own hair would lighten to blonde. And of course, the only thing I like better than wildlife spotting is eating, so every day we ate three enormous meals of delicious curries and grilled fish and rice and bread and ginger tea.

A small salt-water crocodile on the banks

Local fishermen on their way to town

The Sundarbans are essentially a set of mangrove forest islands, some of which have been surrounded by levees and drained for agriculture, with rivers weaving in between them that expose mud flats with the tides. They are one of the world’s largest wetland, mangrove, and estuary systems with an incredibly diverse ecosystem incorporating wildlife from the land, rivers, and Indian Ocean. It has one of the largest tiger populations in the world and also one of the only places that tigers are known to actively hunt people. Since the only way to really see any of it is by boat, we spent a lot of time cruising the river in a beautiful narrow boat with questionable stability. In two days I saw dozens of bird species (five kinds of kingfishers alone), several types of deer, a species of endangered dolphin, salt water crocodiles, monitor lizards, wild boars, and for one brief instant, a royal Bengal tiger sleeping in the mangroves. Anytime the guides get excited about something, I know I’m seeing something rare and good, and judging by the guides reactions to the tiger, it’s not an everyday occurrence (twice a month is the average, apparently). Too soon, it was time to get back in the bus - after the walk/boat/rickshaw/boat reverse trip - and endure the accident-free trip back to Kolkata. The next day I hopped a short flight to Assam and a long car ride to Kaziranga, which I planned on including in this post, but am now thinking I've ran on long enough for today, so I’ll leave it for later.

Sunset near the border with Bangladesh

Mangrove trunks in black and white (which isn't much different than in color - gray trees, gray water, gray mud)

Going back to the point I was making at the beginning of the post, it was an interesting experience to be thinking “I’m in the Sundarbans, someplace I've been hearing about since I was a kid, and thinking it was near the ends of the earth.” On the one hand, it was thrilling and rewarding, and I did see my tiger, but on the other, it wasn't nearly the mythical place I had grown up imagining. There is incredible wildlife, but there are also thousands of people scattered throughout living their daily lives, and numerous tour operators, and a peaceful “eco-camp” that made me delicious meals every day (I’m not complaining). In other words, much more than what I saw on the nature shows, and in some ways an even richer experience than what those shows led me to expect. Everywhere I go, this trip challenges and contradicts my expectations, and only in rare cases does it confirm them. A lot of the time, I’m not even aware I had preconceptions until I realize the reality is different than what I was expecting and I think, overall, that is one of the most consistently rewarding parts of the traveling.

One of the numerous kingfishers

A much larger salt-water crocodile, on his way to the water

6 months of random mobile phone pictures

I know, not the most intriguing of titles, right? But there have been a lot of photos that I've taken that haven't made it onto the blog because I forgot about them, or they didn't fit, or they were funny but not really relevant, so I figured I could put them all together at once at the halfway point of the trip. Many of them are street graffiti, which I found a lot of good examples of in Europe and some are just things that made me laugh. Enjoy!

Curious street sheep

No idea what this is supposed to mean, but I loved it (Slovenia)

Smug street cat

Still my favorite museum of the trip. At times poignant, touching, wrenching, and silly, it's good proof that while every break-up is unique, heartbreak is universal (Croatia)

I've seen "Fish Spa" and "Doctor Fish", but never massage. Who's massaging who here, and why? (India)

Why don't more American banks use giant inflatable sea creature to advertise mobile apps? (Kuala Lumpur)

A great use of a blank wall (Singapore)

My kind of Christmas decorations - Jack and Sally from The Nightmare before Christmas (Singapore)

I don't know if this person knew this window affirmation could be read from the street, but I found it touching, especially the way it was reversed from the outside (Slovenia)