Category Archives: Indonesia

Day 93 – Mon-three-versary!

cool fruit

cool fruit

What a day this was! It started golden already, waking up as the fishermen returned with their morning catch. The surf was still there, the view was too and the hills gave us shade from the sun long enough to get all our gear packed before the sun hits the beach. As promised our breakfast was waiting for us at Blasius’ place at 7 am. Dried banana baked in a dough mantle that looked a bit like croissants, tea and “kopi” to go with them. I love the local coffee, by the way. A lot like greek coffee, the ground and sugar are all mixed together and served unfiltered. To round it off we got offered sawo. The green fruit is eaten like a fig, broken apart and the inside that tastes a bit like sour banana with the texture of ripe pear is then nibbled out. The fruit was good, but it left a bizarre gum-like residue on the lips, like sap.

Very welcoming.

Very welcoming.

After breakfast Blasius took us and his middle son with him to his parents’ house to introduce us. We had a lovely welcome there, another round of coffee and a round of family photos. When Blasius told us that his dad is growing cocoa, amongst other things, I asked him if he had ever tried the cocoa (knowing that a lot of producers don’t know how the end product, chocolate, tastes like). He was a bit confused, nodded and wandered off. He came back with two fresh ripe cocoa pods, opened one and took a segment with bean in his mouth. We did the same and started munching away, chewing the bitter bean … when he spit the cleaned bean right back out! Turns out that one can eat the sweet sour fruity skin of the bean, which is quite good. The bean is disgusting of course, until dried, roasted and mixed with heaps of sugar …

After the visit it was time to leave and I asked what we owed for the dinner and breakfast and he said whatever we were ok to give. Ah, what a terrible burden! I gave 100k rupiah, and he seemed genuinely happy with this. After a sec, I added another 50k (all together $17.50 NZ). We did not have to pay for accommodation and the food was excellent, plus the kindness we received!

On our way down we saw 15 calmly crossing the road. Magical!

On our way down we saw 15 calmly crossing the road. Magical!

The road to Moni and on up Kelimutu was a beautiful mountain road. We had to stop for 15 minutes at a work site, but it was only a couple of turns and we could move to the shade to sit it out. The Trans-Flores Highway is great, reminding me a lot of NZ roads (although a tad less repaired). After a brief lunch in Moni, we headed up the volcano(es). From the car park it is only a 1.5 km walk to the viewing platforms. It is all about the three candela lakes here, each one a different colour and all visible from a single point. On the way we spotted macaques, shy as they should be, on the track. Wohoo, wild monkeys!

Up top we met Lili and Sebastian, a couple of French backpackers. We had a good chat and were able to fully NZ-geek-out when Lili told us about her working holiday visa and her soon to start NZ year 🙂

satisfyingly green

satisfyingly green

The road down from here to Ende leads through a super narrow valley, beautiful rice fields or rivers at the bottom of them and overall a riding highlight on this trip so far. One of these roads that deserve a youtube GoPro clip. The only downside was another road closure for half an hour and two work sites with muddy roads, but nothing too wild. When the road opened again, we got spilled through the work site in a frantic rush of motorcycles and down and out towards dusky Ende. Once there, a wrong turn got us into a police station, and after we got swarmed by officers we got a final escort through the one-way jungle to our guesthouse.

Day 92 – Surprise at Koka Beach

We took our time this morning. The original plan was to stay two days at Lena house to get a bit of a rest from the ferry but since we had arrived here yesterday at 8am and didn’t do anything except for resting and eating, we felt good enough to travel on. The idea still was to have a short day though.

Getting ready to leave. She Ye took a picture of us because we just have so few with both of us

Getting ready to leave. She Ye took a picture of us because we just have so few with both of us

Breakfast with pancake and fruit salad was very yummy. She Ye also had breakfast so we had lovely company. Talking to other travelers is always good fun. Matt appeared quite a while later. Both of them warmly recommended Koka Beach where they had just been. So we put it on the agenda to check it out, at least.

It was warm, very warm at 11.30am when we left. And almost lunch time again. The next bigger city was Maumere so we planned to have lunch there. When we got there, nothing really took our fancy while I remembered a recommendation for a restaurant in Paga. According to the GPS, Paga was a mere 20km onwards so we decided to give Restaurant Laryss a try. It was astonishingly hard to find, in the end. We passed it on the first try, met a bunch of schoolkids ad had troubled turning around but found it on the second try. The sign had fallen down and nothing was advertising it as anything else but a regular looking place anymore…

Lunch at Restaurant Laryss

Lunch at Restaurant Laryss

The owner spoke English and a bit of German which Flo used to get a recommendation for food. Thus, he ended up with squid (very yummy according to him).

From Paga, it was only a short ride to Koka Beach. Off the main road, you take a small track down to the beach, maybe two kilometres. We were greeted by a guy with a machete at his side and a twelve year old shadowing him. He spoke English quite well and let us know that he is volunteering as “beach keeper” for Koka Beach: He gets a dollar from every visitor but for that money, he looks after the beach, clears it of rubbish and has a strike rule that no motorbikes are allowed right on the beach. He wasn’t kidding. The beach looked amazing! Funny story at the side: Our motorbike and our trip reminded him of another traveller who had stayed at Koka Beach. Turns out that Hubert, the German traveller we met in Dili, had stayed here for a couple of days.

A local named Blasius runs a little warung, shop and ‘guest house’ for Koka Beach. Right at the beach, a couple of tiny huts have been built out of bamboo which can be rented for $3 dollars a night so you can either stay in one of those or camp with your own tent. Some shaded benches and deck chairs for day visitors or use at the beach complete the set. All of them are also made out of bamboo.

Surprise attack during the selfie shot =P

Surprise attack during the selfie shot =P

We decided to stay for a night in a lovely hut. Since we didn’t have a mosquito net, we used just our inner tent in the hut. It was almost like living in a hobbit hole right at the beach. =P

Dinner was prepared by Blasius’ wife for 6 o’clock. It was lovely, delicious and way too much food. Two grilled fish were dished up for Flo while I got egg fritters, spinach and a delicious tomato-chili-salad that was just a notch too hot for me but which I ate anyway. Blasius joined us for dinner, well at least our dinner conversation, and we talked in English, a bit of Bahasa and a lot of gestures. Afterwards, we were treated to tea and coffee (local coffee, brewed like Greek ones) and an invitation to visit Blasius’ parents in the morning after breakfast.

It was dark early so we listened to an audiobook and took some photos in the dark before actually going to sleep.

Day 91 – A question of style

We got of when it was still mostly dark!

We got of when it was still mostly dark!

The boat was early! We were mentally prepared for a lot, but not really for arriving at 5:30 am, ahead of schedule. Never mind, we got a moderate level of sleep out of this night and were ready to embark onto Flores in the first light of day. After a last brief interlude – before everyone could leave, an ambulance backed onto the ferry and the coffin got heaved into it by the assembled crowd. With a long salute of the ship, the ambulance rode off into dawn, and we close behind.

View over the bay at early morning

View over the bay at early morning

I have read about a series of guest houses 100 km to the east offering beach views and much needed tranquility and not too much in terms of sights on our way there. The road offered gorgeous views and was in good repair. That allowed us to arrive at our destination still early in the day at 8:30 am. The first place we went to, Lena House, had a bungalow at the beach available. Tired and exhausted we were more than happy to call it a day and booked ourselves in.

While the room was prepared, we got into a conversation with Andy, a globetrotter character originally from the UK, and his lovely partner from Java, where they currently reside. As we were talking, we discovered that we had an interesting thing in common. A while back I would have been surprised, but NZ and traveling really made us accept that small world encounters are more common than one would think. So it turned out that both of us have hosted Chris Schlatter, a motorcycle traveller from Switzerland, and his partner Francesca at different points of their trip.

Has been alive quite recent

Has been alive quite recent

After a lot of lounging and relaxing, we decided to follow a recommendation by them to have dinner at the guesthouse next door. As it turns out they would eventually join us, and later on we were joined by She Ye and Matt. The dinner turned out to be … exciting. No meat was available in the kitchen, so Andy set out on a quest to find us something nice to share. Nina was sorted, with an eggplant curry using the only remaining eggplants. When Andy came back, there was more than one raised eyebrow. He bought meat all right. In his hand on the bike was a feathered, white and very much alive chicken! Turns out he got the directions to the chicken farm and not to any sort of butcher. Well, the bird met its timely end right there behind the kitchen and we got a great shared dinner out of it. We washed it down with some home distilled arak, a sort of palm tree spirit.

Day 90 – Ferry Ride

The day that Flo and I really weren’t looking forward to: Taking the ferry from Kupang on West Timor to Larantuka on Flores. A 15 hour ferry ride.

Mahdi style baths are not for everyone ...

Mahdi style baths are not for everyone …

Anyway, we tried to get up late and failed horribly. The sun now rises at about 5.30 which means you start waking up around 6am. At 7am we gave up and went to have breakfast. Toast and jam as well as coffee was included in the price for the room and while we were munching away a French couple arrived doing a similar route to ours on push bikes, and also the other way around. They asked us a bit about Timor-Leste before heading off to find cheaper accommodation.

We, however, packed up and rode to the ferry terminal. Accounts of the ride we had read/heard promised a horror trip on an overcrowded ferry with no life boats etc. Common advice was to buy dinner and snacks for the day as nothing would be available on the ferry itself so we carried 4×1.5l of water, oreos, chocolate cookies, salted corn snacks and dinner with us.

professional stevedoreing ...

professional stevedoreing …

The ferry was bound to leave at 2pm but advice also stated to be there early to get a ticket. Arriving at 8am, tickets were no problem. NZ$35 for shipping us and the bike across the ocean for 15 hours doesn’t seem too much. Then we had to wait. The officer explained with gestures that Rocinante was too big for a regular motorcycle parking spot and would need to go in after all the lorries had passed. Thinking this might take hours, we started walking around but were called back before long and drove onto the ferry. While passing the gate, our tickets were checked and devalued. Hm.

Rocinante got her spot but was not tied down. We could just hope for calm waters so that the bike wouldn’t start sliding or falling. But then we were on the ferry at 9am. Parts of our tickets already ripped off. I didn’t trust our Bahasa Indonesia enough to explain that to an officer if we left the ferry again. So we bit the bullet and claimed a space, a whole row, towards the back of the ferry. At about 10.40am it started to fill up. Also, with more passengers, many, many vendors came offering snacks, fresh fruit, whole meals with rice and meat or eggs and much more. We weren’t too sure about the guy selling sunglasses but most of the other items made a lot of sense including cross word puzzles and colouring books for kids and mats so that you can sleep on the floor. Despite our overpreparedness, we spent a couple more dollars getting a proper lunch, fresh oranges and two sleeping mats. It seemed to be a thing to spread those on the ground and lay down.

1 mm to separate sleeper and filth.

1 mm to separate sleeper and filth.

At what felt like 1pm, our tickets were checked again and by then the ferry was full, maybe even over capacity already, but by no means as overcrowded as we had been made believe. Surprisingly, no one contested our complete row for two people so we put our mats on the ground and had two places to lie down: One across all four seats and one on the ground. The spaces around us were well filled though and checking up on Rocinante showed us a colourful picture of people, chickens and a coffin in the previously empty space at the cargo floor. The coffin was accompanied by a whole company of mourners who lit candles and probably prayed.

The ferry left right on time if not even early and we were on our way to Flores. Trying to make time go by while reading, we got a bit tired of a group of young Indnesian men (early twenties) who seemed to have too much testosterone and needed to show it. Also, we figured, they enjoyed the white audience even if Flo and I tried our best to completely ignore them. Anyhow…time went by okayish till dinner, then another hour of reading and off to bed. Each of us had a pair of trusted earplugs and with those, I slept quite long. Sure, you wake up and turn around…but then I went back to sleep again immediately.

Day 89 – Western Timor

Cheers and all the best to you!

Cheers and all the best to you!

After a somewhat creative breakfast at our hotel in Kefa (egg on toast with jam), we were ready to hit the road one more time on Timor. While we were loading up the bike, we were approached by a young Indonesian who turned out to be Stef Ndun from the island of Rote. He seems to have a knack for collecting overlanders in Kefa  and is aspiring to join us on the road one day. I wish him all the best and would hope that he manages to get out there himself one day. It is about time that we see more travelers of non-European decent.

The road was good to excellent for most of the way and traffic was very light until mid-morning. Because we want to try and catch the ferry to Flores on Sunday, we decide against major detours and headed pretty much directly to Kupang. Around 11 am, coming down from another lovely mountain town on a limestone cliff (Soe), it started getting seriously hot. It is the end of the dry and everything is brown, heating up fast and there is little shade most of the way.

Lovely place, great food

Lovely place, great food

At 1 pm we have made it to a recommended Hotel in Kupang, desperate to get out of our gear and get some food into us. Once again we failed with regards to our spending discipline, going for a double with AC over a twin with a fan for $5 NZ more. Somehow it is harder to keep strong if everything is so comparatively cheap anyway.

On the other hand, cost for food really have plummeted. For lunch we went to a warung recommended by the Lonely Planet guide and spend 42000 IDR, or about $4.50 NZ for the two of us including drinks.

The afternoon was spend hogging the hotel WiFi – all in style with some afternoon tea free of charge. We have really been craving some youtube lately and got our fix. Needs must.

Our night market pick

Dinner was another great experience: We went to our first night market. These kinds of open air temporary food courts are popular all across south east Asia. The local version had loads and loads of fish, barbecued to order over eucalyptus wood fires. For some reason, I felt more like satay skewers myself today, also barbecued to order and utterly delicious. After some small sardine found its unfortunate way into Nina’s dish, she luckily found consolation in the desserts provided by another cart.