Fabulous Flores

 

 
Flores, named by the Portuguese "flowers", is a wonderful varied island which is just seeing the development of tourism, particularly at the western end near to Komodo Island (home of the Komodo Dragons). Our two weeks on the island enabled us to explore places off the beaten track, which we had not visited on our previous visit three years ago. The trans Flores highway runs the length of the island and twists and turns up and down the mountains which form the backbone of the island. It has been rebuilt over the past three years, joins the main towns and now provides a relatively easy, though not fast, route across Flores. To either side of this main route the roads have not been maintained and so few tourists venture into these areas. Having our own vehicle enabled us to explore some of these areas.
The south coast of Flores consists of rocky shores where the mountains meet the sea, with occasional white sandy beaches facing the crashing surf from the southern ocean. These are virtually completely deserted offering that Robinson Crusoe feeling of only seeing your own footprints in the sand. We spent several nights by one beach at Repi where each evening the local water buffalo walked along the beach to their overnight resting place amongst the dunes.
Camping by other beaches it was fascinating to watch the morning arrival of the fishing boats to offload their catches, some at formal jetties, others by young boys swimming from the boats with large barrels of loose fish which they passed to waiting motorbikes, or small pickups for onward transport to market. All along this south coast fishing is a significant occupation.
The central mountains are home to many small villages and we visited both a traditional village built on a fantastic hillside location, and the cave where the Flores Hobbit (an early hominid Homo Floriensis from 60,000 to 100,000 years ago) was discovered in 2003. There is still much debate over this dwarf Hominid and whether it represents a dwarf Homo Sapiens of a separate branch of Hominid. Although there is a little museum (sadly closed) it was easy to imaging the hominids living in the cave and exploiting the fruits and wildlife of the valley, which is still relatively undeveloped.


Heading further north the mountains become steeper, and the once tarmacked roads considerably worse (thank goodness for, high clearance, 4 wheel drive and low ratio gears) with some steeply terraced hillsides for rice production, until to the north of the mountains the scenery suddenly becomes very dry. This is another undeveloped area where the government is just starting to put in irrigation to allow year round crops and the relocation programme is bringing in people from Java and Bali. The coast is mainly mangrove interspersed with undeveloped sandy beaches facing a very gentle sea lapping at the shore. Again few people and very peaceful.
One feature of all these beaches is the variety of shells and on Flores in particular beautiful coloured sea washed stones in greens, blues and reds. They are so attractive we ended up collecting lots of extra ballast for the van, which we will need to ruthlessly sort before long.


All along Flores are volcanoes and we revisited Kelimutu which has three craters each containing a different coloured lake. We had planned to camp in the car park to climb and see the sunrise, but were told we were not allowed to, so had to settle for the sunset from the top and sunrise from part way down - but still a beautiful sight.

Flores has presented the most spectacular sunsets, with fantastic colours most evening ranging through beautiful pastel colours to vivid orange and red skies.
So now we have taken a 26 hour ferry ride back to Surabaya on Java (the city where we entered Indonesia) and have booked for the van to be shipped to Perth Australia in two weeks time, so we will have to spend the next fortnight cleaning the van inside and out to be like new. Australia has very stringent bio security requirements so there must be no grease, oil or dust, or insects etc anywhere.