Civilization

Back in Bali …. Ahhhh …. Good coffee, whole wheat bread, broadband internet, flushing toilets and soft pillows. After returning from the wilds of Flores, we headed back to Ubud, the artsy tourists’ Mecca of Bali. For about a day and a half we ate well, relaxed and shopped for traditional wood carved masks and shadow puppets.

Having dove to our hearts content, we decided to head to Kuta (the commercial tourist Mecca of Bali) to try our hands at surfing. I can safely say that I will never try surfing again (sorry, Kathleen). Edan started our lesson with an unfair advantage having tried surfing a couple of times on the shores of northern California. I, on the other hand, was a complete disaster.

The truth is, it’s not that hard to stand up on the board and to “ride the wave” for all of three glorious seconds. The real problem is that getting out far enough and positioning oneself properly to “catch the wave” is a real bitch. I wasn’t even so bothered by the paddling, which is what most beginners complain about. I just didn’t enjoy getting pounded down and bounced around by the waves like a small fishing boat in a massive rainstorm. After two hours, our eyes stung our nasal passages had been corroded from several flushings of salt water and the sun had burnt us to a crisp despite that we were wearing t-shirts commonly known to surfers as “rash guards”. Today, my abdominal and arm muscles are killing me and Edan’s forehead is so red that I’ve started calling him Lobster Head. Well, it was an experience, I can say I’ve tried it and Edan might even be crazy enough to do it again.

One of the greatest things about spending our last two days in Kuta is that our friend Marie, one of our fellow divers in Flores, returned to Bali at the same time. We decided to meet up at Bali’s trendiest restaurant, KuDeTa. This was the polar opposite of Labuanbajo. The restaurant is set on a private beach with huge lounge chairs facing the water. Inside, the restaurant and bar had the same trendy minimalist design of many places we’ve frequented in New York.

Upon arrival we passed several security checkpoints, no doubt an effort to assuage tourists’ fears of terrorism. We were ushered to our table, already reserved by Marie – the first reservation we’ve made for the whole trip! Before ordering we were served bread and olives …. REAL olives, not the canned ones that have made appearances in other Southeast Asian restaurants that try to be trendy and western. The food only went uphill from there. After dinner, we adjourned to the beachside lounge chairs for desert where we watched the surf pound the beach under spotlights.

Today we will nurse our aching bodies and watch movies (our hotel rents dvd players for $2.25 at day). Tomorrow, we’re off to Kuala Lumpur ….

Flores, Komodo Rinca – No Lakes, No Hominids, Plenty of Fish

Flores didn’t work out entirely as we had expected, largely because of our poor planning. We went with three goals: visiting the three volcanic lakes of Mount Kalimutu ; seeing the archeological sites where scientists are still uncovering evidence of the life and times of Homo Floresiensis: and doing some high quality diving. We went one for three, but can’t complain. And I still haven’t quite found a sense of balance in Asia . When I lived in Egypt I learned that the rules of traveling there were quite simple – bargain for everything; never plan anything in advance because “full” or “too busy” doesn’t exist; and whatever you do, don’t ever pay for anything in advance.

Jenna and I haven’t really worked out the Southeast Asian rules yet. Most transport has to be booked in advance, and much of it must be paid for in advance too. Some visas need to be procured in advance too. But on the other hand, this doesn’t mean that the people you pay for their services in advance can be trusted.

Our flights from Bali to and from Flores , for example, were a mess. We booked on one airline, and arrived early at the airport to discover that they routinely cancelled most of their flights (as they had ours, despite having confirmed it the night before), and through sheer luck got on another flight with another airline on the outbound leg of our trip. We went through some shenanigans on the return leg too. Hence – don’t book in advance, don’t pay for transport until you are sitting on the vehicle. On the other hand, we didn’t plan adequately for Flores – it is a large island with terrible infrastructure, and we couldn’t get around it with any kind of speed or comfort. It takes advance planning and patience to get around – you need to rent a car, or find a reliable airline and clearly plan your travel around their most reliable flying dates. And the one place we did book ahead – our dive company – was fantastic. If we had booked farther ahead they might have found us a room in a very nice hotel (which was full!), but as it was they found us a tolerable space in the least offensive hotel in the fishing village turned port city of Labuanbajo . So, we’re still working out the right balance of planning vs. not planning. Is it a necessary exercise, or a painful bother that just unrealistically raises your expectations? Haven’t worked it out, and with only a short two weeks left in the region, we don’t expect to.

We landed in Labuanbajo on Dec. 2^nd. Our first impression was of fierce heat and dust. We later amended it to include bad food and noise. The city really has very little to recommend itself, but it is an interesting study in development policy. Labuanbajo was a backwater fishing village with nothing more interesting than a squid-fishing fleet just a few years ago. Although it was situated on the doorstep of Komodo National Park , the place had absolutely nothing going. It still has nothing very good going, but it’s quite a busy place. A few years ago the Japanese development agency paid to build a proper set of piers and a harbormaster building in Labuanbajo. It’s safe to say that it’s revolutionized the place. The bay itself is something of a miracle – it’s still covered in soft corals, starfish, juvenile reeffish, and sea urchins. But the daily pounding from the greatly increased number and size of boats and their concomitant dragged anchors, dumped motor oil, and the general Indonesian disrespect for the natural world (God’s great rubbish bin) is doing an efficient job of rendering the harbor into yet another murky and detritus choked bight, as seen all around Southeast Asia . The locals figure it will take another two years, tops. Still, can’t be too hard on the Indonesians, I could have substituted the name of any other group of people there. To add to its dirty “charm”, the city is going through a noisy and explosive building spurt. Although I can’t be sure, I’m sure it is a direct result of the pier – suddenly people are coming to Labuanbajo, trade has certainly increased, and the net result is development.

The growth is good for most of the people of Labuanbajo, even better for the expats and Javanese who run the big businesses, but unnecessarily destructive. I cannot tell you how many times one can look around the city and see something that could be done better and with less harm to people and nature but isn’t – roads in steep hills that the government starts but doesn’t finish, virtually assuring increased erosion and damage to the shacks of the poorest residents who live by the water, inadequate electricity that causes people to run generators in their homes and breathe in diesel exhaust. And of course, like all intelligent Indonesians, the good citizens of Labuanbajo have the normal degree of fear and distrust for the police – those officers of the peace who buy their office and then have to earn the investment back through extortion, bribe taking, and the invention of minor rule violations which they then so kindly agree not to report. At least no one fulfilled my nightmare of offering to sell us fossils (see our Bali blog updates).

So, Labuanbajo was unattractive from the start, and failed to grow on us. And we discovered that Mount Kalimutu was on the far end of the island, some 500km (and at least 15 hours travel overland) away. To get to it, climb it, and come back would take at least 3 days and a considerable additional investment of money. Similarly, the archeological sites were in a difficult to reach locale with the added obstacle that no one in Labuanbajo knew anything about them apart from the fact that they existed. Confronted with these problems, and the fact that there was fantastic diving in Komodo National Park , we took the path of least resistance.

We spent six days diving the park with a great outfit called Reefseekers. We made friends with other divers, had a lovely time with one of the owners, a passionate diver and conservationist named Kath, and generally enjoyed our time away from Labuanbajo. In addition to the diving we also managed to hike around Rinca island (one over from Komodo) and see Komodo dragons, chase illegal fishing boats out of the national park with Kath, and generally enjoy the deserted beauty of the islands off of Flores ’ west coast. The scenery is arid, sunbaked, equatorial scrub. Islands of rock and red earth that look so much like mountain peaks you can never forget that’s what they are. They’re covered in dry brush and leafless trees during the dry season (which should have ended by now, but there’s been no rain in 11 months), their shores fringed in the always bright green of mangrove swamps.

Flores, Komodo and Rinca separate the Indian Ocean from the warmer tropical seas that end in the Gulf of Thailand , and the islands themselves are separated by fairly narrow straits. The result is many currents and thermoclines, fast water and tricky navigation for small boats, and massive tides – up to 3m difference between high and low. It’s not a world record by any means, but it’s a significant thing when you wake up in the morning and find half the boats in the harbor are beached because the tide has pulled the water out some 100 metres.

Two oceans, small straits, lots of islands, strong currents, hot and cold waters, and strong tropical sunlight as your energy input – you get lots of plankton, lots of other marine life, a huge diversity of habitats, and fantastic diving. We’ll try to post pictures, but I’m not sure we’ll manage it. We now have hundreds. We’ll winnow them down and post the very best when we get home. We’ll also try to put a few more videos on YouTube.

For those of you who dive:

Flores is worth it. The currents can make it tricky, but Reefseekers makes it safe. We were jumping into cold water with all kinds of crazy currents – upwellings, downpulls, laundry machines, and strong currents that can move you at 3 knots in one direction, stop, reverse direction at a speed of 2 knots, then pick up again. But sometimes you would hit a site and there’d be nothing at all – you could hover until your air was done and you’d still be where you started. Regardless, a quality dive shop makes all the difference. They read the water, knew what we should expect, and planned the dive accordingly. We never lost a diver, never got separated, and never really got scared.

And the diving is fantastic and cheap. It’s not as cheap as Egypt or Honduras , but compared to most places in the world, US $65-90 (depending on the distance to the site, some are three hours by boat) for two dives is not bad. There was more coral than we had seen anywhere else, including in Bali . On one dive we hit a patch where I think I saw every species of clownfish (anemone fish, “Nemo”) in the books in less than 10 minutes. We saw healthy reefs, and as a result we saw with little difficulty animals that don’t live or are difficult to see elsewhere: fish of unusual size, hawksbill turtles, gorgeous nudibranchs, a giant trevally over 1 metre in length, and countless sharks, bumphead parrotfish, napoleon wrasses (one close to 2 metres), and of course the ubiquitous damselfishes, anthias, gobies, etc…

There are also some very unique spots – we did a wall dive with zero current at a site called Batu Bolong that blew both of us away. We had dived Batu Bolong three days earlier with a fierce and crazy current – one of the divers had been spun in a laundry machine on his way to the surface. With a strong current it is a beautiful but, by Komod standards, ordinary site. But when we came back the island waters were still.

The wall starts at around 7 metres and bottoms out somewhere outside of vis, maybe at 40 or 50 metres. Without a current we didn’t need to hug the reef or hide on one side of the island – we started at 26 metres on the southeast side and came up to around 7 on the north side, then went over top of the wall and nearly died – the view was phenomenal, like floating over creation. There were snappers and groupers and wrasses and sharks until your head exploded, the corals were healthy and widespread, and the clouds of smaller fish were so thick I almost felt that it was harder to swim through them. Jenna couldn’t stop talking about it when we hit the surface – it looked like she was going to cry.

We did a very different but beautiful dive in a haunting channel at the south end of Rinca island. There is a horseshoe shaped strait that separates a small island, Nusa Kode, from the larger Rinca. The channel is fairly cold – 24 degrees, and full of plankton. It means that the visibility is terrible, so things kind of pop out at you from the gloom. The small life down there was incredible. There are nudibranchs that have not been found anywhere else and are scientifically undescribed. There are sea apples – anemone-like animals (probably in the anemone family, certainly in their order) with a bulbous base and tree-like limbs that come in every combination of blue, green, red, purple, and yellow that you can think of. The limbs of the sea apple grasp plankton and are individually drawn into the mouth. It’s like a tree with a hollow at the top of the trunk that individually draws down and sucks in the branches to strip them of food, then pops them back up. Each branch is drawn down in turn, then released to find more food. It goes on, but you get the idea.

We cannot recommend it strongly enough to anyone who reads this and dives: Dive Komodo and Rinca – you won’t regret it. Just be sure to use a very professional shop – currents are tricky and that can mean that a great dive site yesterday will be crap today. You are often several hours from land, the radio doesn’t work everywhere, the nearest recompression chamber is in Bali, and that means that if all goes perfectly you are at least seven hours from serious help in the event of a major decompression event. So don’t have them. And you need to have oxygen onboard (Reefseekers did, a few of the other diveshops apparently don’t). We recommend Reefseekers – they are extremely safety conscious, ardent conservationists, thoroughly professional divers, and are building a resort on their private island which should be open next year, thereby considerably enhancing the Flores experience by limiting your exposure to Labuanbajo. We dove with a Finn who has been throughout Europe and the Red Sea, a Frenchman who has dived Australia , Tahiti, and much of the southern Pacific, and dive instructors who have dived Thailand , the Carribean, Egypt , and other parts of Indonesia . All agreed that Flores, Komodo, and Rinca contain many of the greatest sites they have ever seen.

How Hot is It? Eight degrees.

Eight degrees from the equator. That's damn hot. It's taken a while to get used to it, but Bali is an easy place to get used to.


We left Jogja over two weeks ago and landed in Bali. We immediately went north to spend a week in a time share resort in Candidasa, a small fishing village on Bali’s east coast. The week was a gift from Linda, Jenna’s mom, and we milked it to the fullest. This was by far the nicest hotel we’ve stayed in on the trip. We had our own bungalow with a pool outside our door. The ocean was 20 steps from the bed, as was the restaurant, and they even offered room service in case you couldn’t be bothered with the walk. Most importantly, it was our good fortune that the resort was on the same harbor as Gili Mimpang, Gili Tepekong, and Gili Biaha – some of the best dive sites in Bali. We used the resort’s dive company, and it was a 3-6 minute boat ride
(depending on the site) from our resort’s pier to the mooring lines for the nearest dive sites.

The diving was wonderful, although the currents were fierce at times. On one dive at Tepekong we ran into currents of about 5 knots at a depth of 10 metres as soon as we descended. There was no mooring line to hold and nothing to do – we kicked as hard as we could and were still moving backwards until we just held onto the reef to stay in place. There was no waiting it out, and after 12 minutes of furious work we had exhausted over half our air. We aborted the dive, and promised to try it again another day. Sure enough, two days later we headed back and were rewarded with calm (although very cold!) waters and a gorgeous reef.

Before we go any further, here’s the part you have to take on credit, because it is more than a fisherman’s tale: we saw both an oceanic sunfish (mola-mola) and a whale shark, and have no photos to prove it. The whale shark was a fast visit during a wall dive at Tulamben (a few seconds, nothing more), and we found the mola-mola on a camera test-dive at Gili Mimpang (I had just re-lubricated the o-ring on the camera case and wanted to take it down sealed and packed with tissue paper to ensure there were no leaks).

The mola-mola was really incredible. We were down at around 20 metres in a mild current with a visibility range of about 10 meters at Gili Mimpang, and the sun was in front of us, so that objects we approached were silhouetted. Our guide motioned up and to the left, and looking there I noticed that we were very slowly approaching a large and somewhat triangular black shape, almost like a rock overhang or pinnacle that I had somehow failed to spot earlier. Then I realized that although the pinnacle was getting bigger, I wasn’t moving. I was in the middle of one of those Obi-wan Kenobi “that’s no moon” moments, and before I could communicate with Ms. Skywalker at my side we were face to face with a mola-mola. It was huge – at least two meters tall, and a meter and a half long. There were full grown butterfly fish and moorish idols picking at the scales around its back, and they looked like pimples compared to the big fish. We spent a good 15 minutes hunkered down on a few pieces of coral watching the mola-mola do her thing. Mostly her “thing” consisted of hovering in place and letting the smaller fish scrape off whatever was growing on her. Occasionally she eye-balled us to be sure we were keeping a fair distance – I think that her eye was big and yellow – kind of like a shark eye.

In short, life in Candidasa was splendid. We were having one of those terrific Bali experiences that you here people talk about at dinner parties – the weather was stunning, the diving was terrific, we were in a quiet little backwater and being pampered every which way. There was even a massage table by the ocean where you could get a traditional Balinese massage ($7/hour) while listening to the waves break on the concrete pier below. We also rented a motorbike and took a spin up to the north coast to the village of Amed – another Balinese diving mecca. We checked out Eco-Dive, a great dive shop that we ended up diving with for a few days, and on our way home Jenna took the wheel as we took the long way home. The long way was a winding coastal rode that stretched out for nearly 50km up and down the hills of northeast valley. It was the Balinese equivalent of driving in the Gaspe peninsula. But instead of small Quebecois fishing villages around every beautiful bend of a well paved road, we had a narrow and bumpy road, often with no guard rail, small and quite poor Balinese fishing villages, and a surplus of mango trees laden down with ripe fruit. I can’t count the number of times I wanted to hop off the back of the bike and sneak into some farmer’s orchard to snag a ripe fruit. And to top it off, we had stunning views – of the ocean, of Mount Agung (Bali’s highest peak), of narrow valleys, terraced hillsides, and children bathing in the waterways by the roadside (apparently most of the villagers in Northeast Bali do not have running water in their homes).

After we left Candidasa the diving stayed as good, and perhaps even improved. We spent a few days in Amed and used them to dive in Amed, Tulamben, Gili Selang, and another small bay near Amed called Bunutan. Tulamben is famous as the site of the wreck of the Liberty, an American naval vessel that was torpedoed by the Japanese in WWII, beached, and then sank when it was pushed out to sea by a volcanic eruption in 1963. Today it is an amazing dive site – a wonderful artificial reef where I saw the biggest groupers and sweetlips I’ve ever seen – each was well over a metre long, and we have a picture of the sweetlips to prove it. But the sites up north are also great for finding the small and hard to find creatures that are the real divers treat – we saw ghost pipe fish that looked so much like coral you almost needed to poke them to see them. We found a crab so well camouflaged that I couldn’t find it whenever I looked away for even a split second – it was brown, slightly hairy, and looked so much like a hard coral that it took me 30 seconds to find the head even after the dive guide had pointed me right at it. We’ll try to post up a few pictures, but as always, connection speeds are quite slow.

Tomorrow we’re heading to Flores. We’ll use it as a home base to dive the islands of Komodo and Rinca. Hopefully our next update will have photos of Komodo dragons, and of hiking on Flores. With any luck we’ll hit two important sites. The first is a series of volcanic lakes in the mountains of western Flores that allegedly change color throughout the day as the chemicals in them react with sunlight. The second is the archeological site where Homo Floresiensis (“Flores Man”) was recently discovered. Apparently, a different hominid group was alive and doing quite well as recently as 13,000 years ago, until Homo Sapiens showed up on Flores. There’s a good article on them that we found in the Scientific American special issue on evolution that came out in August/September. If you have time and a curious mind, it’s a neat issue to get your hands on.

The gist of the Homo Floresiensis story is that they migrated to/were trapped on Flores long ago and evolved separately from other hominid groups. Like many animals above a certain size, they “dwarfed” when trapped on an island as a reaction to the ecological conditions of island life (I don’t know what these are exactly or why they tend to lead to dwarfish, but this is something I picked up from the Sci-Am special issue. It seems that animals below a certain size (roughly that of a rabbit) have the opposite reaction and grow to “giant” sizes for their genus. Thus the Flores man was full grown at 3.5 to 4 feet, and hunted pygmy elephants. If we can learn more on Flores then we’ll share. Unfortunately, I’m afraid we may get the chance to learn too much, and too close. In theory the archeological sites and their artifacts should be closed to all but official tours (if there even are any), but Indonesia is flagrantly corrupt, even to our naïve tourist eyes, and some specimens from the Flores digs have already disappeared. I hope to find a local museum, or archeology buff, or an official tour schedule, but am scared we will be offered fossils that we have no business laying our hands on.

We’ll report back in a while. We probably won't have decent internet access again until we reach Kuala Lumpur. After Flores we fly to Kuala Lumpur for a few days to renew our Indonesian visas, then we will spend a week in Jakarta with Sidney, Wayne, and Sam again. After that we'll head off to Hong Kong for a few days, then we're done, back in New York. Thanks for reading, we'll be in touch again in around two weeks.

Jakarta to Bali

We arrived in Jakarta on November 15th and were met in style by Wayne and Sidney, close relatives of Jenna. They were both working and babysitting their son Sam and his friend Jacob when we arrived, so they sent someone else to meet us at the airport. We had a blast at their house, even if it was only for a quick 15 hours or so. We even had bagels, which we’ve seen only through closed eyes since September.

We didn’t really have much of a chance to see Jakarta, since as mentioned above, we left no more than 15 hours after landing. First impressions: traffic, plenty of the combination shopping mall and condominium complexes that I’m beginning to think of as the standard ex-patriate pod - hermetically sealed against the developing world. You can live for days without leaving the mall/condo. The city is also poorer than Bangkok, or less committed to beautification. In Bangkok the slums are hidden, while in Jakarta they are clearly visible from elevated highways.

Very quickly we all hopped a plane to Jogjakarta, the second city of Java, once an important capital city and major trading centre. Today it is a busy city of several million people, but seems a little light on tourist attractions. It is, however, cheap and possessed of a number of good value restaurants. We were a little touristed-out anyway after Bangkok, and having two six year olds in tow takes a slightly dull sight and makes it unbearable. So we paid lip service to the idea of seeing important sites and made a fleeting visit to an old palace in the middle of the city. But we really spent most of our time splashing around in the water. Jenna and I checked into a modest and quite lovely hotel with a quaint little swimming pool, then immediately took a cab to go meet Sidney, Wayne, Sam and Jacob, along with Jacob’s dad, at the Hyatt Grand. The pool at the Hyatt made our hotel’s pool look like a puddle. The Hyatt pool had water slides, linked sub-pools, and enough space for a water-football game. We all had a great time.

The main attraction of our hotel was the owner’s collection of birds. We first noticed them at dawn. I was awakened by songbirds, close to the room. I went outside and discovered that there were nearly 100 different birds across the courtyard (and that the owner had considerately caged a small but quite loud bird in the starfruit tree in front of our room). Most of the birdcages were arranged in a penned and roofed area on the other side of the swimming pool. The owner looked to be a retired man with time on his hands, and I noticed that it took him nearly two hours just to feed his birds - every morning. In addition to parrots and talking birds, he had dozens of smaller songbirds that I couldn’t begin to describe. Each bird or pair had its own cage, most of them the old fashioned cylindrical kind that tapers to a ring at the top, suspended from the roof or supported from below. The birds must have made the man particularly happy, because two hours of pouring water and cutting papaya before you get to really start sweeping up the bird crap is not my idea of a good time. I feel that if you’re going to put that much energy into an animal, you should at least get a meal out of it in the end.

Which brings us to Bali. I’m currently writing from Ubud, a hill city in the middle of Bali. We are renting the upper floor of a villa here, and from our window this morning I had a lovely view of a flock of ducks waddling around and eating in our neighbour’s rice paddy. I am pleased to watch them waddle around and be cute, and content in knowing that they will soon be “bebek tutu” (smoked duck), a classic Balinese dish. Feeding ducks that will one day feed you: that I understand.