final word from the Lesser Sundas

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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 over half an hour 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-packed 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 350,000 rupiah (about NZ$62)!! 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 have raised a family while I've been in the Lesser Sundas.



Today I purchased a ticket for tomorrow to Manado (Sulawesi) with Lion Air which is almost a million rupiah cheaper than the flights with Garuda. I guess I'll find out the reason why tomorrow. I haven't seen a new bird for well over a week now (for non-birders, a "new bird" is simply one that I haven't previously seen in the wild), but that will change as soon as I get to Sulawesi! Now that my time in the Lesser Sundas (Nusa Tenggara) is over, I thought I’d take the time to write a little summary of my time in these islands.

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 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.
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've seen so many chickens crossing roads that even I've grown tired of making witticisms about it, and I can't translate any of them into Indonesian so nobody but me gets 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. I am hoping my funds will stretch (just) to the end off the five months but its going to be a squeeze.

And finally to finish, I have discovered that Anak Krakatau, the volcano between Java and Sumatra that I was to be visiting later in the trip, has been erupting constantly -- hundreds of times in fact -- since June and it is currently on a level three alert meaning no fishermen or boats of any kind are allowed near.

There are now also photos in the previous several weeks of blogs. The connections are still slow so it takes five or ten minutes to upload one photo, hence most entries have just a few photos added.

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Photos

nutmeg finches (Lonchura punctulata) in palm tree at Bali Manik Hotel
not the best of photos but the adult is on the right and the young ones to the left and back