Advertisement
Published: December 12th 2009
Labuanbajo
One of our top 5 beautiful sunsets!24 November 2009 - 26 November 2009
HOTEL:
Gardena Hotel
The most popular place in town and really one of the only places. The others are pretty ramshackle. Gardena is OK price-wise and has a nice restaurant and outside seating area with great views of the harbour. Staff don't speak much English though, and rooms can be a bit unclean.
After our "farewell party" aboard our Perama boat and a very decent nights sleep, we had a chance to explore our first town on our trip through Flores. Flores isn't exactly small, spanning about 700km west to east (actually, that's how long the "Trans Flores Highway is!), and 1.8million people, it's a pretty large island. It's also a very poor island and Labuanbajo, clinging to the western tip of Flores is no exception.
When we had approached Labuanbajo yesterday afternoon by sea, it looked like quite a picturesque place. It still is, but once there you get a feel on how poor Flores may be. It's a pretty weathered and slightly ramshackle town but it does have a certain charm to it. The view from our hotel bungalow is very picturesque, looking out at the harbor below, scattered
Labuanbajo
Our room at Gardena with outrigger fishing boats and sheltered by a few islands. Other than that there is not much here. There are a few dive shops, which bring some reasonably upmarket restaurants. A couple of nights recuperating after the 3-day boat voyage went down nicely for us and we spent the full day here walking the only main street, eating at a cheap but slightly dirty local restaurant (in the name of keeping costs down) and having a load of Bintang's with our friends from the Perama trip.
We will next try and head inland to Ruteng, approximately four hours by bus (they say) to see what else Flores has to offer.
Advertisement
Tot: 0.257s; Tpl: 0.018s; cc: 9; qc: 55; dbt: 0.1693s; 1; m:domysql w:travelblog (10.17.0.13); sld: 1;
; mem: 1.1mb
