Sitting in front of our bungalow on Flores Island overlooking the clear turquoise waters of the bay I finally felt like we were on holiday. This was a world away from my last attempt to reach Flores I had been issued the wrong airline ticket and landed on a different island in one of the biggest f@#%k up of my traveling life.
Luckily nothing could go wrong on this holiday. I had booked all the right tickets, the hotels had all been reserved, we’d got a boat to take us to Komodo Island so we could visit the dragons and there was a sweet little puppy to play with. Just when everything seemed perfect the little s#%t bit me. It wasn’t a bad bite, but the fact that Flores Island has the highest incidence of rabies in the whole of Indonesia after Bali means that it didn’t need to be. After spending a good hour scaring myself, I found the Manager of the Hotel who just laughed at me and told me there was no need to worry.
The next morning, vowing to never again play with little puppies on Flores Island again, we caught a boat from the pier at Labuan Bajo to the private resort island of Kanawa. This would be where we would be spending the next five days of our holiday. It was the perfect spot with beautiful sandy beaches, a warm tropical sea and a great coral reef surrounding the island. It was a perfect place to get away from it all and forget about the rest of the world and just enjoy the simple things in life.
Kanawa was great; picture postcard beautiful and if I liked nothing better in life than sitting on a tropical beach all day then I could have moved there, but by the third day on the island I was getting bored. I had read all of my books. I had walked around Kanawa, I had climbed the hill and with nothing else left to do I had swum round the entire island; so it was a good thing that the boat arrived to take us to Komodo.
It took us about three hours to get to Komodo from Kanawa (which means it would probably take you about five hours to get from Flores island to Komodo). It was a beautiful day for the trip. The sky was clear and the midday sun beat down on the wooden timbers of the boat. As the sea was calm the journey didn’t seem to last long and it felt like less than an hour had gone by when we docked up on Komodo.
Komodo was nothing like Flores Island; it was a dry windswept place with stunted trees and dangerous dragons. The only buildings we saw was the small visitor center for tourists that were surrounded by lazy komodo dragons (the guards say they don’t feed them, but there were an awful lot hanging around the kitchen). For me the highlight of our trip to Komodo wasn’t the dragons (they are just big monitor lizards after all), but the amazing coral reefs around the island.
