Steven Raucher's World Tour
2001-11-25 in Flores, Indonesia
Diving and Dragons, all in a days work
Back to where I began this tour of Flores, in this shoddy port town of Labuan Bajo. Finding we had two days to kill we leapt at the chance to mix a bit of diving and komodo dragon watching into an action packed Sunday.
Taking into account all the advice we have received from travellers, the island to go and see the komodo dragons, is in fact Rinca. Komodo is too touristy and has less interesting landscape, plus the dragons on Rinca have never been fed by the park to attract animals for tourist photo opportunities. It requires more luck to see the dragons on Rinca but in turn it is supposed to be a richer experience.
Can you imagine my surprise when after not even walking 100 metres on the island we had our first encounter with a dragon? Pulse racing, we bought our entry tickets called our guide and off we went. It was almost too easy, every turn there was a dragon, some even walking on the foot path causing a bit of a traffic jam. After walking for about 30 minutes, the guide hushes us in great dramatic style and starts stalking towards the stagnating pools of a dried up river. Bingo! 12 dragons climbing over one another taking turns immersing their upper bodies into the carcass of a freshly killed water buffalo. Magic stuff. There was even a little �Lady and the Tramp� parody with two Komodo Dragons eating different ends of the entrails of the buffalo. In the picture below, the large black object to the bottom left is the buffalo covered in mud, and the dragons are all having a bit of a �feed�. We had struck gold, I can imagine a wildlife photographer waiting weeks for pictures like that and here by chance we just walked right into it.
To augment our success dragon watching I literally bought the T-shirt, the one with a nice smiley Komodo on the front (all proceeds go to the park before anyone out there starts giggling!).
We had arranged our scuba diving and our Rinca visit through the scuba diving company this way we got to Rinca quicker in a small speed boat and were halfway to our first dive site.
The fish in Indonesia are incredible and absolutely gigantic. 2 metre Napoleon Wrasse, massive Bumphead Parrotfish, loads schools of everything, just amazing really. I don�t know how to write about these two dives without being incredibly boring, I will just write some of the names of the fish from my log book.
Bumphead Parrotfish; Harlequin sweetlips; Spotted Sweetlips; lined sweetlips; Moorish idols; banner fish; angel fish; bat fish; yellow back fusiliers; napoleon wrasse; puffer fish; lion fish; travallies; emperor fish; anemone fish; turtles; black tip sharks�
Get the idea?
All that lies between me and Bali are two ferry rides and about 500 kms on lousy roads; let�s hope my tyres arrive...
 a dragon strutting his stuff |
 feeding time for the hungry dragons |
 going down? |
 a school of yellow back fusiliers |
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