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The Malay Archipelago, 2009 (1 Viewer)

Larry Wheatland said:
Did you actually get to see an Oriental (presumably Sunda?) Cuckoo up the mountain? I just got driven nuts by hidden singing ones.
one landed in a tree about twenty feet away and sat there posing for me. Was very nice of him, especially as I find cuckoos to be a devil to find normally. Sometimes I just get lucky with them. I list it as Cuculus saturatus lepidus, so either Oriental or Sunda depending on how you want to split it
 
FLORES, Labuanbajo and Rinca, 23 - 24 June

The bus from Ruteng took an hour less to Labuanbajo than it had on the trip up. I’m not sure if it was better to get the ride over with faster so it would just be over, or if longer would have been better as it would have been somewhat less nauseating and we wouldn’t have almost been taken out by trucks on two of the blind hairpin bends. The chap in the seat in front of me threw up four times during the trip!

In Labuanbajo I stayed at the Gardena Hotel which is where most tourists stay - and there are a lot of tourists in this town (it being the gateway to Komodo). At this time of year, at least, its advisable to arrange your hotel ahead of arrival as everywhere seems to be fully booked (I just got a room on lucky chance). Labuanbajo is stinking hot and it didn’t strike me as a very friendly place. Its very different to the other places I’ve been in Sumba, Timor or Flores. In fact it reminded me of a smaller dirtier version of Kuta on Bali, where everyone is just out to get as much money from the tourists as they can. In the main the only people who show smiles are those working in the tourist industry piling people onto Komodo and Rinca. I had sort of expected that as a town heavily frequented by tourists (it being the gateway to Komodo), the town would be more....um, "polished", but its just the same as every other Indonesian town, looking like an earthquake has just hit and nobody's bothered to clean up yet. There was a pothole in the main road through town that seriously was about six foot deep and something like eight foot across. Should we fill that in? Nah, just throw the rubbish in there. As far as I could tell there were only two ATMs in Labuanbajo, inconveniently located at the opposite ends of town to my hotel, but contrary to what I had heard pre-arrival they don’t only take local cards so that was a relief. There are mosquitoes everywhere; on my first night I neglected to utilise a mosquito net and got bitten 21 times, and not little bites either, great big welt-like bites. Nasty. Blackouts seem to be regular. And there was a mosque right next door to the hotel which broadcast ultra-loud chanting through speakers, starting at 4.30am! On the plus side there was a tokay gecko living in my bathroom. In Labuanbajo I also saw the first feral pigeons of the trip: not exactly a thing of earth-shatteringness but its just interesting because usually you see them in every single town you go to anywhere on the planet.

I didn’t do much the first day in town, just went for a short walk in the late afternoon to see if I could see any birds south of town. I had a trip report that said a dirt track leading to the New Bajo Beach Hotel is good for elegant pittas and Moluccan scops owl. The hotel has a different name now and I couldn’t find the mentioned track. I did find what appeared to have once been some sort of beachside park but which is now neglected and overgrown and inhabited by some rather unpleasant-looking feral dogs. Not many birds to speak of and nothing I hadn't seen before although black-naped monarch and golden-bellied gerygone were new for the trip list. At the hotel I sorted out a boat to the island of Rinca for the next day. Most of the town is geared towards getting tourists out to see the Komodo dragons; there are tour operators every few metres down the main road. At the hotel three guests had already organised a boat to take them over to Rinca and then to the resort island of Seraya Island, so another girl and I both joined in the Rinca section of the trip. With the five of us the price per person was only 140,000 rupiah (about NZ$25 or so). To that has to be added the National Park permit fee of US$15 for 1-3 days (US$25 for 4-8 days which is what I got because I was intending to go to Komodo as well in a few days), 20,000 rupiah for the entry fee to the park and another 20,000 rupiah "retribution fee" whatever that means (both doubled to 40,000 if getting a 4-8 day ticket). However there wasn’t a camera fee which I had read there was, so that’s something. Of course the boat operators don't tell the tourists about all the permit fees - the tourists understandably enough think that the the cost of the boat ride is the only outlay - so it was left to me to inform the others, half of whom then had to rush back to the hotel to get their wallets. I'm really not sure what happens to those tourists who get to the island and then have no money on them to pay for entry.

The boat ride (on the “Prima Dona”) took just two hours to Rinca. You can stay overnight on Rinca in the park accommodation for 30,000 rupiah -- or for just a little bit more on Komodo for a whopping US$40 per night! I had originally been planning on staying overnight on Rinca, but it was easier to just come back the same day. I was running a bit over-schedule on this leg of my trip and the longer I spent in the Lesser Sundas the shorter the length of time I would have in Sulawesi, due to having to be out of Indonesia on a specific date for visa reasons. So therefore I did Rinca as a day trip which worked out quite well. You only get about three hours on the island but the dragons are easy to see in that time and there is little birdlife there. The only reason I wanted to stay overnight was to try and search out a little rat called Komodomys which was only discovered in 1981 and as yet has (I think) only been found on Rinca, but the likelihood is that I wouldn’t be able to find it anyway so it was a small sacrifice.

Douglas Adams in his book “Last Chance To See” made the observation that the landscape of Komodo is reminiscent of the Komodo dragons themselves, in the way the brown barren hills are all rounded and pleated like the bodies and limbs of the dragons, and he is absolutely right. All the islands around the area look the same, and it takes very little imagination to see the dragon characteristics of the land-forms. The dragons of course are really giant monitor lizards which subsist on buffaloes, deer and pigs. On Rinca you walk up to the reception area where you get the permits and a room if you’re staying overnight, and there are Komodo dragons lying all around the huts like big scaly dogs. Its sort of like seeing them in a zoo in-as-much as they aren’t doing anything at all, just lying there in the shade, relaxing, gloomily watching the barred doves pecking around in the sand by their heads. Oh look another lot of tourists, they think, opening an eye to take a quick look then back to sleep again. You are required to have a National Park guide with you any time you are walking on Rinca or Komodo. There are a couple of trails near the “settlement” at Loh Buaya so the group of us went for a two hour ramble along a well-prescribed track, passing other lots of tourist groups with irritating regularity. The Komodo dragon has a lot of mystique about it but it is really very easy to get to the islands (just a short inexpensive flight from Bali to Labuanbajo then a short boat trip) and probably thousands of tourists do it every year. Yet this sort of cheapens the experience. Seeing the dragons should be an awe-inspiring experience but the island is so thick with tourists that it becomes a rather pedestrian thing walking there with everyone else, pointing at a dragon, pointing at a macaque, pointing at a buffalo. I’m very glad I went and I did enjoy it a lot but it wasn’t the way I would have liked the moment to be. Apart for seeing the dragons sleeping round the huts, we also saw quite a few “in the wild” as it were, out in the bush, including a group languidly surrounding a buffalo with a great rip in its hindquarters where a dragon had nailed it. The buffalo was taking its stand in the middle of a waterhole while the dragons basically just sat around on the banks looking at it, waiting for it to die. Like a tourist in Labuanbajo surrounded by tour operators.

After we left Rinca we stopped off for snorkelling on a tiny island called Pulau Kelor where I went for a walk in the forlorn hope there might be Nicobar pigeons somewhere on there (but I did see yellow-bellied white-eyes, pied chats, collared kingfishers and barred doves). Turned out the island was privately owned and regular people were only allowed on the beach which measured all of fifty metres in length. I found a path leading off the beach but someone came along and told me to leave because only guests of Reefseekers Bungalows were allowed up there (even though he also admitted the bungalows were still being built and the place wouldn’t be open till next year). Then we dropped off the others at Seraya lsland and I travelled back to Labuanbajo on the Prima Dona in the dark through the disappointingly non-phosphorescent sea, half-expecting to run aground in the maze of islands and reefs and have to spend the night on a sinking boat. Once back at the harbour I had a fun obstacle course jumping from my boat to another one, climbing through that to its front, then jumping to another boat and then another, and then shinning up a too-delicate ladder to get onto the wharf, all in the dark.
 
FLORES, 25 - 28 June: Tiny parrots and giant rats, part I

I guess I should start this entry by contradicting what I wrote in the last entry, about Labuanbajo being an unfriendly town. After spending a number of days there the locals became used to me walking back and forth around the streets looking for food and water, and soon they were smiling and saying hello and asking how I was. So I decided that its not an unfriendly town but rather a town full of unfriendly tourists. That may sound weird, me being a tourist myself, but I’ve watched the way most of them interact with the locals and they are just downright rude. Not all of them of course but a good percentage. If I was a local I’d be a bit sick of it all too.

Its so flaming hot in Labuanbajo that you can’t do anything for most of the day. Even just walking down the road to get food or internet leaves you as drenched as if you’ve fallen in a swimming pool. Basically I went out early in the morning if I could muster the gumption, look for birds for a couple of hours until the heat started building up (at say 8 or 9am), then I went and lay down somewhere in a congealing pool of sweat and dirt until evening. How the British and Dutch managed to survive in Indonesia without electricity for fans is beyond me.

The two days after the Rinca visit were a complete bust as far as finding wildlife was concerned. There were two birdy spots I wanted to visit, Potawangka Road and Puarlolo, both fairly close to Labuanbajo and both technically easy to reach. The problem was that it is impossible to get anywhere very early by using the local buses, and hiring someone to take me places would cost more than I was willing to pay (I guess I’m just not a very dedicated birder!). I tried going to Puarlolo first, which is where the endemic Flores monarch flycatcher lives. I had been told I could just wait at the crossroads at the end of town and hitch a lift but the only people who stopped wanted exhorbitant amounts in the region of 300,000 rupiah (about NZ$50). So I went back to the hotel and discovered that by then there were a whole row of buses waiting about ten metres from the door. Every bus that goes from Labuanbajo to Ruteng passes Puarlolo because there’s only one road. The first bus I tried was bound for Ruteng and it was all good until I said I was only going as far as Puarlolo, then suddenly the bus was full. The second was also fine to start with but then the driver tried to tell me they actually don’t go past Puarlolo after all, which got some indignant responses from some of the other passengers, so he changed tack and said it would actually cost 100,000 rupiah to Puarlolo not 20,000. They obviously didn’t want someone on the bus taking up room that could be used for someone paying to go all the way to Ruteng, and at this point I got fed up and went back to the hotel for breakfast, and then went to Potawangka Road by motorbike instead. By this point it was already late morning and I wasn’t even sure at what point on the road I should be in order to find the main target birds (Wallace’s hanging parrot and Flores crow) so I got off at the first patch of forest and then walked for several hours without really finding anything at all. The second day I dutifully went out of the hotel to try to get a bus to Puarlolo for the second time - and there were no buses! Eventually one drove past, I flagged it down, and then we proceeded to drive in circles round town trying to pick up non-existent passengers. I think there must be some mysterious Friday void where nobody uses the buses in Flores. Anyway, I didn’t get to Puarlolo till 10am and again the birds were all at siesta and I got nowhere with my searches.

Puarlolo is about 36km out of Labuanbajo, and there’s a big sign-board on the side of the road with endemic Floresian birds on it so you can't miss it. You just walk up the access road from the highway for about 100metres to the Telkom Station and to the right of the gate you’ll find a rough track leading into the forest. The forest here is quite low but so damn thick I don’t know how anybody finds the Flores monarch without tapes. I certainly had no luck! There are also Flores hawk-eagles in the sky above the tower, except when I was there. Walking back towards Labuanbajo along the highway for about 300 metres there’s a big trail on the left that goes through really good forest. Birds I saw here included russet-capped tesia, flame-breasted sunbird, black-fronted and golden-rumped flowerpeckers, crested dark-eye, emerald dove, golden whistler – definitely would be even more better stuff in early morning.

Rather than consider those two days as miserable failures I instead decided to call them reconnoiters for later visits, although in the event I never got back to Puarlolo after all.

Potawangka Road is much closer to Labuanbajo, only about 10km out of town, so its readily accessible by motorbike. I decided to try my luck there a second time, but at a proper birding hour (6am), and as I stepped out of the hotel a bus to Ruteng passed by - right after I’d finished complaining that you can’t get anywhere early on the local buses! I stuck to the plan however and went to Potawangka Road. I got the driver to stop at what seemed like a good distance into the forest, and as I was paying him a hill mynah landed in a nearby tree, a bird I’ve wanted to see in the wild for years. So it was a good start. It took about two hours to walk back to the main road (it was downhill) and I saw quite a few good birds including orange-footed scrubfowl, Gould's bronze-cuckoo, yellow-spectacled white-eye, Wallacean drongo, flame-breasted sunbird, pale-shouldered cuckoo-shrike, and two more of the birds that were on my most-wanted list, the red-cheeked parrot (like the hill mynah, a bird I’ve wanted to see for many years) and the Flores crow. Seeing a crow may not sound very exciting but this particular crow is only found in one region of Flores and nowhere else on the planet. Also its not all brash and in-your-face like other crows, its very shy and wary although I did see five of them that morning. They don’t exactly slink away when they realise you’ve seen them but its as good as.

A bird I didn’t find that morning was the Wallace’s hanging parrot, a little wee thing about the size of a sparrow. When I was a boy I read about this bird in Joseph Forshaw's brilliant encyclopaedic book "Parrots Of The World" and decided that one day I would go to Flores and see them. The bird itself isn't overly exciting to look at, mostly green with a bit of red, much like any of the other species of hanging parrots actually, but it wasn't the appearance of the bird that intrigued me it was the text in the book. The copy I have now, published in 1989, has a text column of only about ten centimetres that basically consists of a description based on the one known museum specimen, a note about some eggs that probably belonged to another species entirely, and just three sentences on its life history that starts off with stating that its "a mysterious bird, about which almost nothing seems to be known, and the type is the only specimen that I could locate." Since then of course Flores has become more accessible and birders go there reasonably often so I'm a bit late to the party, but that's all right because I never liked parties anyway. With all that in mind, for a third morning I returned to Potawangka Road and for a third time I failed to see a hanging parrot. Actually that third time I didn’t see the crows or hill mynahs either although there were lots of other birds in evidence.

Apart for the hanging parrot, the other main animal I wanted to see on the island was the Flores giant rat. By this time however I had stuck that into the too-hard basket. There’s almost no information available on the internet or in books about it beyond its size and colour; even its habits and where it lives on the island seem to be unknown or at best educated guesswork. Absolutely nobody I spoke to about it in Ruteng or Labuanbajo had any clue what I was talking about. My searches in the forest were equally unrevealing. In the natural history museum at Bogor (in Java) there is a stuffed specimen (according to Lonely Planet) and it seemed like that would be the closest I would come to seeing a Flores giant rat with my own eyes [except when I got there I discovered there wasn't a stuffed Flores giant rat there at all dammit].

The rat wasn’t the only thing I was having trouble with. I just couldn't get to Komodo Island!! I'd seen the dragons on Rinca already but I did want to see them on Komodo as well because apparently they are a different colour, secondly there is some select bird-life there such as the lesser sulphur-crested cockatoo, and thirdly you just can't be in the area and not go to Komodo because that would be stupid! I could have hired a boat just for myself but that would have set me back somewhere in the region of NZ$200 and I couldn’t justify that. I was basically sitting around waiting for some more tourists going to Komodo so I could join in and we all distribute the cost to everybody’s advantage. But nobody was going to Komodo, they were all going to Rinca because its closer and cheaper to reach. It was very frustrating! Some people said to me one morning that they were going to Rinca because everybody goes to Komodo and therefore Rinca is more select and quiet. What rubbish! They read that in some guidebook and the reality is the exact opposite. I honestly never found a single person actually going to Komodo.

Finally I have to mention when I was in the restaurant at the hotel waiting to be given food, and a medium-sized (about 20cm) tokay gecko fell from the ceiling to the floor and sat there looking a bit stunned. After a couple of seconds he recovered his composure and scuttled straight up my leg, round onto my back and then up onto my shoulder where he sat for the rest of the evening, either being under the impression that I was a tree or that he was actually invisible. I named him Mr. Tokay Gecko. He did little to keep the mosquitoes at bay.
 
thanks to all who have commented. Always a pleasure to know people are enjoying the read. After all, there's not much point posting it if no-one's interested in reading it :t:
 
FLORES, 29 June: Tiny parrots and giant rats, part II

For the fourth morning running I headed up Potawangka Road in search of the Wallace’s hanging parrot. Its interesting going through villages early in the dawn because it gets quite cool overnight, so you pass the villagers all squatting in blankets along the roadside, like snakes basking in the stored heat of the tar-seal. This time I had some information from a person in town that the place to go was all the way up to the village of Tebedo, twice as far as I’d been up before, and there I could see the parrots in the trees about 300 metres past the village. But again no luck. It didn’t help that unbeknownst to me at the time, my motorbike driver took me right through Tebedo and onto the next village so I was in completely the wrong place anyway. As I was walking back along the road, having just passed through the real Tebedo, I passed a man walking from the other direction who stopped to talk. As it turned out, Frans as he was called, knew exactly where to find the hanging parrots because he often took people to see them (“all the time, tourists come from all over, always want to see nuri -- nuri, nuri, nuri -- why they all want to just see nuri?”). As it happened it was too late in the morning by the time I met Frans and the parrots would be all back deep in the forest, so we arranged for me to come back that afternoon at 5pm when apparently I would be assured of seeing them in the trees outside the village. As we sat in his house drinking coffee and discussing parrots and other birdy things, I threw my usual question out there, about whether he knew tikus (“mouse”), and yes he did; did he know tikus besar (“big mouse”)? "Yes, yes, this big", he says, holding his hands apart at exactly the right distance to show the size of a Flores giant rat. They live in the cave, he says, motioning to the forest behind the house, and they also come into the village to eat the coconuts. I asked just to be sure, they were found here in this area? Yes, yes, their name is bitu, or in Manggarai (the local language) beco. This seemed like a wild stroke of good luck, finding the locality for both of my most-wanted Floresian animals in one fell swoop. But you know what they say about getting your hopes up before your chickens are cooked… or something.

In the afternoon I returned to Tebedo with ample hopes. The motorbike driver I got this time must have had a few too many spills off his machine because he was the most singularly dim-witted person I have ever met. I explained to him where I wanted to go a couple of times, then we set off in the wrong direction. I explained again, and we set off in another direction. I got him to pull over and explained again, and again, and again, masterfully resisting the urge to just head-butt him in the back of the skull. I don’t think it was my Indonesian that was the problem because this was the fifth time I’d been to Potawangka Road and every other driver had understood my directions first time. We finally set off in the right direction, and every few minutes he would swivel round to repeat the instructions to be sure he understood; that was when he wasn’t trying to up the arranged price mid-trip that is.

At Tebedo there were no parrots in the trees. We looked at the fossilized tree trunk sections that litter the ground. Frans asked me what the name was in English of a particular tree growing there and I said I didn’t know, and he said in Indonesian it is called kapok which I found etymologically amusing. The kapok is a South American tree and the name comes from Tupi-Guarani (a local American Indian language); it got transferred intact to English and obviously from there to Indonesian, and now the Indonesians consider it to be their own native name! Because there were no parrots there at that moment Frans said he’d show me the “big mouse cave” so we hiked off into the forest for about ten minutes. The cave wasn’t really a cave as such anymore, more like a large overhang, but it had obviously once been a cave as there were big stalactite formations in there. Along the back wall were various small openings to burrow-like cave systems which looked like good hidey-holes for giant rats. Frans pointed to a large burrow in an earth bank. “Landak” he announced. “Oh”, I said. Landak is a porcupine and while I haven’t seen a Sunda porcupine before it wasn’t really what I was after. Were there bitu here as well? I asked. Frans shrugged and said “sometimes” in a very non-committal sort of way. On the way back to the road to see if the parrots had arrived he was saying “July, August, September, many many nuri, all the time”. “And now?” I asked, knowing what he was going to say. He shrugged and said “sometimes” in a very non-committal sort of way. “Sometimes,” I repeated to myself, perhaps a bit too sarcastically. Back at the road we wandered around all the trees in the area until dark but no hanging parrots came. Then we returned to the cave to see if any bitu would come out. It took a bit longer to get there than last time because we got lost in the dark, but eventually we found our way. No bitu came out and neither did the landak. I don’t blame him. With the amount of noise we made bashing through the undergrowth he probably thought we were coming to knock him on the head for dinner.

The ride back to Labuanbajo was pretty scary on a motorbike that had a slow leak in the front tyre, a wobbly back wheel, and was obviously running out of petrol, not the best of combinations when on a deserted mountain road in the middle of the night several hours walk from the nearest settlement. Every so often there would be little ‘chinks’ as bits fell off the bike, probably something un-necessary like wheel nuts. Once on the main road it was even worse because nobody dips their lights for approaching traffic and you can’t see a thing. I kept expecting to get swiped by the side of a lorry or to just run right off the edge of the road. When trucks went passed they kicked up clouds of dust that absorbed the beam from the headlight (when it was working that is!) so there was just a wall of lit dust ahead.

So as yet no hanging parrots and no giant rats. They may or may not eventuate. Something that definitely didn’t eventuate was the boat to Sulawesi (my next destination). The guy who was going to sell me the ticket kept pressing me to give him the 300,000 rupiah for the ticket and I was adamant he needed to make a reservation for it first before I was handing over that amount. As it then transpired, the boat leaving on Thursday didn’t go to Sulawesi at all, it was going to Maumere (another town on Flores); the Sulawesi ferry was a fortnightly one and it wasn’t going till the 12th of July which is too long away for me. There may or may not be another ferry that goes weekly to Sulawesi but I couldn’t get a firm answer on that one from anyone. I thought I had a boat rounded up to Komodo tomorrow as well, but as that turned out the other guy who was “definitely” going had in fact only said he was thinking about going, so that didn't lead anywhere either. And I can't fly back to Bali and from there to Sulawesi, because all the planes are fully-booked for quite a way in advance (because there are so many tourists in this town), so it looked very much like I was going to be stuck in Labuanbajo for even longer. I’d already been there a week, and the longer I was there the less time I would have in Sulawesi. Everything was getting more and more frustrating as the days went by.
 
Classic! All our frustrations and confusions of how to get out of Labuanbajo and trying to work out which island to go to next, have all come flooding back with your narration. Funny place.
 
Always a pleasure to know people are enjoying the read. After all, there's not much point posting it if no-one's interested in reading it :t:

I'm reading, and very much enjoying. You have put me off an ideas of going to see Komodo Dragon however, doesn't seem my sort of place ;)
 
you have way more patience than me - but back in 89 Labuanbajo was a great little town and one of the nicest places I stayed - unfortunately I had no gen and went straight through to climb Kelimutu, where I had no gen either and the reward was a nice view and a rat sharing my bed.

Komodo was a circus back then too, but at least the cockatoos showed.

Cheers
Mike
 
I'm reading, and very much enjoying. You have put me off an ideas of going to see Komodo Dragon however, doesn't seem my sort of place ;)
Rinca and Komodo are not great if you don't like tourists, but the dragons are also found on the western end of Flores where they are truly wild and you actually have to search for them. I was intending to try seeing them at all three localities but I just spent too much time trying to find the rat and parrot, so I only saw them on Rinca.
 
FLORES, 1 - 3 July :Tiny parrots and giant rats, part III

There was only one thing for it now that I knew where both the hanging parrots and giant rats should be found - I went back to Tebedo the next evening (after yet another unsuccessful morning visit) and stayed the night in Frans’ house so I could be “on-site” as it were. There were still no parrots that afternoon (I wasn’t really surprised at all). I had taken my field guide to show Frans the birds. When he got to the page with the elegant pitta on it he exclaimed “oh, very expensive bird this one, 500,000 in the market. A couple of years ago people came with big nets to catch these birds to sell.” I asked if there were still elegant pittas in the Tebedo forests and he said no.

According to Frans the best time to see the giant rats would be at the caves at 11pm. So well after dark we set off into the forest. We waited and waited and waited. I had been getting up extra early, even for my usual earliness, to be up Potawangka Road at dawn to try to find parrots for the last however many mornings in a row, so I was literally falling asleep on my feet while standing in the dark. No bitu came out. Eventually we left the forest and tried the coconut groves near the village. Still no joy. Still, I had managed to gather some information on the rat that was otherwise mostly unknown to me. Its Manggarai name was bitu (or beco but nobody else seemed to have heard that one before) and its Indonesian name was tupai which actually means “squirrel” so it was obviously a transferral in the same way that the English named birds in New Zealand and Australia robins and wrens because they needed familiar labels for unfamiliar things. Funny thing was that previously I hadn’t found anyone who recognized the giant rat from my description but as soon as I could now say its name was bitu everyone knows it. Nona’s brother-in-law had flat-out told me in Ruteng that there was no such animal in Flores, but when I said it was called bitu he and his wife were both suddenly like “oh we know bitu, it eats the coconuts” etc. Other info I discovered was that it lives in caves (or presumably any sizeable burrow or hole), comes out well after nightfall, mostly lives in the forest but also comes into villages after food, climbs coconut trees to get the fruit, apparently it jumps well. The locals hunt it opportunistically if they discover it in the village, but its quite dangerous to try to catch because of its very large teeth. Dogs sometimes kill them too. Somewhat disturbingly I was also told a few times that "when I was a boy" the bitu were common but now they aren't seen so much. Not exactly enough to write a scientific treatise on, but more than I knew before. However I had pretty much run out of time so this would be the last time I would be searching for the Flores giant rat.

The next morning I made my last attempt at the hanging parrot. They say that the eighth time’s the charm (actually third time’s the charm but I’ve always been a bit slow). But even eight tries couldn’t get me the hanging parrot. They simply weren’t in the area at this time of year. Next month sure, but not this month. At least I can say I didn’t give up easy!

There is another site called Kisol which I knew about, but I had no idea where it was or how to get there until (naturally enough) I found out the day before I left Flores. This site is back past Ruteng and is apparently an excellent reliable place to find the hanging parrot and also the elegant pitta. Must go there one day.

I did eventually manage to arrange transport out of Flores for the next day, which would be composed of a seven hour ferry to Sumbawa, followed by eleven hours overnight by bus across the island then another ferry to Lombok, then another bus and another ferry and another bus so eventually after two days non-stop travel I would arrive in Denpasar in Bali. It cost me 350,000 rupiah in total, as opposed to around 900,000 for an aeroplane, so it saved on money but not so much on comfort I could imagine. I didn’t find the Wallace’s hanging parrot, I didn’t find the Flores giant rat, and I never did manage to find a boat to Komodo to join in on which was annoying because its pretty much the only place now where you can easily find lesser sulphur-crested cockatoos because they’ve been hunted out for the pet trade over the entire rest of their range.

I thought I’d use my last day on Flores for a visit to Istana Ular, the “snake palace” as it translates to. A Google search will give a better idea of what it is but basically it’s a big cave system filled with both small and huge pythons as well as loads of bats. What better way to end this leg than with seeing monstrous pythons coiling round stalagmites and swallowing bats? As far as I could gather from information sites and local people, you take a bus on the Ruteng route but get off after two hours in Lembor, then get a motorbike to take you most of the rest of the way followed by a 40 minute walk to the cave. The bit from Lembor to the cave was supposed to take an hour in all. Also you were supposed to have a local guide because of the sanctity of the cave. Sounded easy. I told the bus driver I was going to Lembor to go to Istana Ular. I was expecting Lembor to be a small town so when the driver told me to get out at a few huts I was a bit surprised, but he said this was Lembor and I use one of the motorbike’s there to go to Istana Ular. This was where the confusion started because after the bus left it turned out that none of the ten or so people at the stop spoke any English whatsoever. At this point of the trip I could use some Indonesian for relatively simple things like asking prices, directions, etc but I was very far from fluent so it worked best for more complex things if the other person spoke a little English to go with my little Indonesian. As it transpired, this wasn’t Lembor at all, I was still 7km before there, but one of the motorbike owners knew where Istana Ular was and he would take me there for 100,000. I asked if I needed a guide to go in the caves and then things got very fuzzy as far as understanding went because he thought I wanted to arrange a guide as well, rather than me simply asking if I needed one or not. Eventually after much back-and-forth he said he’d take me there. We set off down a very very bad road of broken rocks for maybe fifteen minutes, then he pulled into a village. Hello what’s going on here then, I think. Turns out the driver didn’t know where the cave was, he was taking me to a person in the village who spoke English. So that’s where I found out that the road to Istana Ular was a very very VERY bad road, much worse than the one we’d just come in on, and furthermore it was an hour and a half ride from where we were and then an hour’s walk before reaching the cave. It was already 11am by this stage and with this new information I had to accept that I wouldn’t be going to Istana Ular. On any other day maybe but I had to be back in Labuanbajo before 5pm to sort some stuff out; and I couldn’t stay overnight in the village as offered because I was leaving the next day for Bali. And because Fate sometimes just likes to kick you in the groin, it also turned out that the guy that spoke English, Yohanes, worked as a guide in Labuanbajo and was taking a group to Komodo the day after I was leaving. Even without going to the cave I still didn’t get back to Labuanbajo till 2pm. The bus completed its run at the bus terminal instead of going all the way into town. The Labuanbajo bus terminal has to be the most inconveniently-sited bus terminal in the entire world. Its almost 10km outside town and because the buses cruise round Labuanbajo itself picking up passengers before leaving, by the time they reach the terminal they’re invariably almost or totally full already, so nobody seems to really use it except for when going to side villages. A bemo from the terminal into town costs 3000 rupiah. I know because I’ve taken them a few times when coming back from Potawangka Road. So when the bemo driver insisted it would cost 20,000 I at first thought I’d misheard what he said, so he repeated it. I said 3000, he said 20,000, I told him where he could go and took a motorbike instead. It was not the best way to end my last day on Flores.

But to end on a more amusing note is the way to go. Perusing some Indonesian/English dictionaries, as you do, you discover they really are quite funny. There are often very obscure English words in there like “burgomaster”. From the Indonesian translation I worked out that “mahlstik” was a paintbrush and “manatma” was a young noble, but “mickle” just left me confused (the Indonesian translation was banyak which means “many”), as did the English translation for pacar which was given as “a plant” (it actually means a boyfriend or girlfriend). And what was I to make of the English word “ ditf ” ?!?
 
Quote: "I had taken my field guide to show Frans the birds. When he got to the page with the elegant pitta on it he exclaimed “oh, very expensive bird this one, 500,000 in the market. A couple of years ago people came with big nets to catch these birds to sell.” I asked if there were still elegant pittas in the Tebedo forests and he said no."

Just to reassure people that there are still Elegant Pittas around Tebedo. We managed a pic of one that came to a whistled impersonation of its call.

An enjoyable read Child, keep it coming.
 
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I was going to put at the end of that paragraph that you had seen an elegant pitta there (I remembered the photo), but it would have interrupted the flow of my narrative, and I knew you would post it.

I, personally, never saw an elegant pitta anywhere, and I hate pittas. Just thought I'd say.

It was fun staying at Frans' house. He had a collection of Der Spiegel magazines that another traveller had left behind. As neither of us could understand German we just went through looking at the pictures and I tried to explain what the articles were about. Even with fairly limited shared language abilities, it wasn't too hard explaining about deep-sea submersibles and strip-clubs but DNA sequencing, cloning, and paedophile rings were a bit trickier!
 
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final word from the Lesser Sundas

So I finally left Flores, via a ferry to Sumbawa. After five hours we came up to Sumbawa and I thought "oh that was quicker than expected" but two hours later we were still chugging slowly along, gradually getting closer. I can only swim in one direction (straight down) but even I could have got to the island faster if I'd just jumped overboard. Once at Sape, the harbour town of eastern Sumbawa, there was a mini-bus waiting to take us to Bima from where the regular-sized buses left from. Seeing that the mini-bus was packed to the gunwales with locals I innocently asked if there was a second bus. "No. One bus. You ride on top. Is OK" was the reply. So three other tourists and myself all clambered up onto the roof with all the luggage. Its a normal sight to see the buses with locals perched nonchalantly all over the roof and hanging off the sides but it isn't really normal to see tourists doing the same. All the way through the mountains to Bima an hour away, the roadside locals stopped and stared in absolute astonishment. Not the usual "oh look, tourists," type astonishment but the gob-smacked "what the hell -- the tourists are on the roof!!" type astonishment. In actual fact, so long as the road is good then the roof is a much nicer way to travel because you're not squashed in like sardines, and the view is great. Sumbawa is really beautiful with its mountains and forests and rice-terraces, sort of the way people picture Bali except its real and not just trickery to get tourists to visit. The following bus ride wasn't as nice, overnight the length of the island on an alternately good/not so good road that was so snaky that you couldn't really get much sleep without risking being thrown out of your seat. Part way through we stopped at a roadside restaurant for food. I was sort of surprised that we were getting a free restaurant meal; I was more surprised that it was at 1.15 in the morning. Then there followed a two hour ferry crossing to Lombok before dawn, on what seemed to be rougher seas than the previous strait, and another bus ride to the next harbour. This ferry to Bali took "four to five hours", which meant four hours to cross then an hour sitting outside the harbour waiting clearance to enter. But there were halfbeaks around the boat which was good (for non-aquarium readers, halfbeaks are a type of fish), and on the crossing I saw my first flying fish which are amazing things, looking like small birds or bats skimming across the surface. In Bali the bus dropped everybody off somewhere in the middle of Kuta not at the actual hotels as promised, so I had to walk for quite a while through the night to get to the Bali Manik Hotel, where I'd stayed last time I was on Bali. That morning I'd done something I don't usually do, and that was pre-book the hotel room, because I knew it was high-season in Bali and there were millions of tourists everywhere. So imagine my disbelief when I turn up at the hotel and am told that there are no rooms, they are all full. I tore a number of good-sized strips off the guy at the desk, even though it wasn't his fault (but I had been two days without much sleep or food, and I had just been dragging my sorry carcasse half-way across town, so I was in a bad mood). I wandered the streets for a long time, passing many other be-backpacked tourists in the same situation as me, and finally after about twenty hotels I found one with a single solitary room left unoccupied, which cost about six times as much as what I would normally pay for a hotel room in southeast Asia. Unless I wanted to sleep in the gutter like a drunken Frenchman I had to take it. So once again Bali had stabbed me in the throat with a sharpened pencil. I loved Sumba and Timor and Flores, even with the ups and downs, but I really do not like Bali one little bit. Early the next morning I set off to find another hotel but no-one knew whether there would be any check-outs till noon, and as Fate would have it I actually ended up back at the Bali Manik Hotel. On a happy note, I was pleased to see that the nutmeg finches that live in the palm tree outside the rooms had raised a family while I was in the Lesser Sundas.

Kuta is a little hell-hole of avarice and gluttony where everyone does their best to claw as much money from everybody else as they possibly can. But get away from there and head eastwards away from the other tourists into the Lesser Sundas and it’s a whole other world, the way Indonesia should be, the way it was in my head. A lot of people still see you as a walking ATM but not to the same degree, and everybody without exception was as friendly as could be. There was the guy in Waikabubak who drove me all round town on his motorbike looking for an elusive National Parks office. There was the staff at the Hotel Elvin in Waingapu who paid for my taxi to the airport for no reason at all. And there was likewise a guy on the plane from Sumba to Timor who randomly paid for my taxi from the Kupang airport into town. Not the sorts of things you’d get in Bali!

The natural heritage of the Lesser Sundas is in a parlous state. The relevant forestry departments aim to protect the forests but have little effect it seems on its continuing destruction. Things seemed slightly better to me on Timor and Flores than on Sumba, probably as a consequence of them being larger islands, but everywhere the lowland forest is almost gone, only the mountains retaining any large stretches. All the islands I visited had wild introduced populations of crab-eating macaques, presumably originally brought in as pets, as well as pigs, deer, giant land snails, tokay geckoes, black-spined toads, etc. Poaching is still a regular occurrence. In the reserve at Bipolo on Timor the forest was frequented by wood-cutters, one of whom I passed mimed pointing a rifle into the canopy to ask whether I was there to shoot birds. Even without hunting, once the forest is eaten away to scraps then the birds will all die out anyway, a connection that most people didn’t seem to understand; I was asked at one point why if the owls weren’t being hunted they were still becoming rarer. Basically what it comes down to is, if you want to see the birdlife of the Lesser Sundas, get there as soon as you can because it won’t be long before its all gone.

Some interesting things I discovered in my month in the islands:
1) Credit and debit cards are useless except at ATMs, and sometimes even then. Even when purchasing flights from the airline companies you need to get out the money from an ATM first and then pay the seven or eight hundred thousand rupiah in cash.
2) Everybody is very friendly and you’ll always have somebody wanting to sit next to you on the bus or help you out for no other reason than that they want to practice their English.
3) Being a birdwatcher elicits no surprise at all. In fact it seems to be accepted as a completely normal activity for a foreigner to indulge in. As it should be.
4) Travelling alone, however, is considered to be very odd, especially if you are spending time in the forest. I was constantly being asked wasn’t I afraid to be in the forest alone, and that it was very dangerous to be by oneself.
5) Every single person has a cell-phone and no matter how remote the location there always seems to be perfect reception.
6) Britney Spears is the most popular person of all time.
7) I saw so many chickens crossing roads that even I grew tired of making witticisms about it, and I couldn't translate any of them into Indonesian so nobody but me got to appreciate them anyway.

Indonesia is not as cheap a destination as I had been led to believe. The prices quoted in the latest Lonely Planet, which was my pre-trip research guide for working out how much everything would cost me, are way off, quite often by 200 or 300 percent. When I had first arrived I was shocked at the discrepancy between what my pre-trip research said and what the reality was. I had thought it was because I was in tourist-infested Bali, but even in the Lesser Sundas away from most tourists everything is just as expensive.

Next stop: Sulawesi
 
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Sounds like a brilliant trip. Keep posting ( in fact, don't bother going home - just bird until you drop :t: )
Chris
p.s. "mickle" is a Scottish word meaning little - e.g. "Many a mickle makes a muckle". I know, but lowland scots is rather strange!
C
 
Travel in the raw - a hard way to earn your birds! But excellent reading.

Ferry/bus/ferry was my route from Lombok to Flores and did a good chunk of the bus trip on the ladder on the back of the bus. Top of the ferry was a good spot for me too - we even got the captain to play our dodgy bootleg tapes from the Sunday market in Bangkok - Credence Clearwater Revival, Elton John & Leonard Cohen providing scratchy accompaniment to the frigatebirds, tropicbirds and dolphins - happy, if slightly surreal, memories!

One day I'll have to go and bird it all properly, which (hopefully) means less painfully than your trip!

Looking forward to the next installment.

Cheers
Mike
 
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