I arranged my flight onwards to Ruteng in Flores (home of the giant rat....hopefully) for Thursday, at the unusual hour for Indonesia of 6am. With three days to utilise I chose to go to Bipolo on the first and third days and back to Camplong on the second, to attempt to try and find the remaining endemic birds of the island. Bipolo was remarkably easy to get to, simply bus to the whistle-stop town of Oelmasi and then take a motorbike to the forest at Bipolo about 15km further on up a sideroad. I was going to just bird along the [View Full Entry]

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Gunung Mutis is FANTASTIC!!! Getting there was a bit of a laugh though. First was a three hour bus trip from Kupang to Soe which wasn't bad because the bus was only half-full (the buses aren't really buses either, they're like bigger versions of mini-vans). Then a quick motorbike ride to where the bemos to Kapan leave from. I had been given to understand that I had to take a bemo half-an-hour to Kapan and then another bemo another half-an-hour to Fatumenasi where I would be trying to track down what was described on the internet as a "basic losmen" owned [View Full Entry]

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Between the Merpati and Transnusa airline companies, planes leave Waingapu (Sumba) for Kupang (West Timor) every day of the week. But as I found out, they're all fully-booked days in advance which was a bit of a surprise. I went on the waiting list for the next day but there wasn't much hope of getting to Kupang before the end of the week. I had inadvertently found myself staying at the Hotel Elvin which was 275,000 rupiah per night (the cheaper fan rooms all being already occupied) so I was going to have to move to a much much cheaper place [View Full Entry]

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I set off for Sumba with excitement and a little concern. The plan seemed easy enough but I didn't know how it would go in practice given that my fluency in Indonesian didn't extend much beyond "punya pacar?" (do you have a boyfriend?) and "umur anda berapa?" (how old are you?). I got lots of small bills changed at the bank because the ATMs give the cash out in 100,000s which are of absolutely no use in the eastern islands (or pretty much anywhere else for that matter). Getting the money from the ATMs was a mission in itself actually, with [View Full Entry]

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I hate Bali. Apologies to anybody who likes it but I loathe the place. I won't go into all the reasons because it would go on for paragraphs and I'd sound like a right whiney tosser, but basically everything was going wrong and after one day I'd had enough. I visited the Monkey Forest at Ubud, more by accident than through any plan, and it was pretty much the only "highlight" of the day, even if one big macaque did pickpocket me and threw his stolen booty off a bridge when I tried to grab it back and then charged me [View Full Entry]

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I haven't been overseas for a while, in fact I haven't been anywhere at all for a while because I've been saving up all my pennies for a trip over to Indonesia. I shall be leaving in two days. I've never been there before so I'm looking forward to all the wonderful creatures I shall spot over the course of the next five months. Initially the plan was to start in Darwin (with a side-trip to Kakadu) because there was a regular Air North flight from Darwin to West Timor but unfortunately the rumour in 2008 was that that flight was [View Full Entry]

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When you're a birder there are always certain birds that just refuse to let you find them. One of my nemesis birds is the great spotted kiwi, the largest of the kiwi species and the one voted at Kiwi High School as the one most likely to remain hidden from sight. My latest attempt of many to find this bird in the wild was at Bullock Creek in the mountains above Punakaiki on the West Coast. I'd been there before and heard only calls and seen only footprints ; this time I was hoping for better luck. But a story isn't [View Full Entry]

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I had a tip-off today via the internet birding community that there was a leopard seal on my local beach. Its not something that occurs every day and I'd never seen a leopard seal before, so it was exciting news. My boss said "oh yeah, that was in the paper yesterday...", so I took the only sensible course of action and ditched work to go seal-hunting. Leopard seals are extremely large and fearsome predators of the Antarctic ocean where they feast upon the flesh of poor unwary penguins. Every so often an immature male, or sometimes even an adventuresome adult, leaves [View Full Entry]

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I had a few days before I left for home but very little money to do much with, so after coming back from Undara I headed once again to Kuranda. Its nicer and quieter and cheaper to stay there than in Cairns, and of course I still didn't have a cassowary to my name. Not having seen a cassowary on a trip to north Queensland is like not seeing an elephant when you go into the elephant house at the zoo. I mean, what kind of birdwatcher can't find a six foot tall bird?! So Kuranda was my best bet. Last [View Full Entry]

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Way out west of Cairns, way out in the Outback itself, is a little place called Undara. There is a lodge there called the Undara Experience. The reason people go there is to see lava tubes. It turns out to be one of my favourite places of all the places I've been to in Australia. The Undara Experience have package tours out there for something like $495 for a night. Or you can do what I did and take the Trans North bus out there for $119 return and stay in one of the Lodge's three-bed dorms for $35. I don't [View Full Entry]

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