Back to Bali: Gunung Agung

If you ask most expats in Indonesia, they might say Bali is overrated. Bali was “discovered” by beer-drinking Australian surfers back in the day. So if you surf, and want to party till you puke, Bali is top of your radar. But, if you are looking for that iconic postcard-image turquoise water, white-sand beach, ringed by coral and palm trees, go somewhere else. Bali will disappoint you. The reality is that there are much “nicer” beaches almost anywhere else in the world.

Now, that said, Bali is growing us. April 2017 has brought us a series of long-weekends, and obviously therefore, the first-world problem of: where should we go, what shall we do with all of these long weekends? So, all things considered, including 1.5-hr flights out of Jakarta, we made the executive decision to go back to Bali. Rough life, we know. However, the mission was centered on a distinct goal: climb Gunung Agung (if you recall, gunung = mountain = volcano) – with some beach time on either side. And, as it turned out, a fantastic combo and highly recommended itinerary (you know, next time you’re in Bali).

Upon landing and a quick 20-mins drive to our accom, whereupon we were on the beach with cold beer in hand, and upon realizing that it was scarcely noon…we were both struck by the obvious: this is good! You see, this is the lure of Bali. It’s hot and sunny, there are beaches and palm trees, and the Balinese have hit the mark in providing the right kind of infrastructure and services bules want when they’re on holidays – something that cannot be said for the rest of Indo.

For us, coming from the mass of humanity and chaos of west Java, it is, as they say, Shangri La. Striking us most, as we toured the island’s inland villages and rice paddies on route to our climb, is the Balinese celebration of beauty. The Balinese enjoy and yes, celebrate beauty. It’s everywhere you look. From the road side temples, to the rice paddies, to the potted plants, to the pools – they do an exceptionally good job with the pools – the Balinese love of beauty is obvious. And, no 4:20 AM call to prayer! (remember, Bali = Hindu, not muslim, so no call to prayer….yah!!).  So ya, we’re starting to see Bali in a new light. Just stay clear of the drunken Aussie surfers, and yer good!

Ok, the mission: Gunung Agung. At 3,145 m, Agung defines the topography of Bali. Indeed, like most landmasses in Indonesia, Bali is an island created by the volcanic eruptions of Agung, and a few other lava vents. Still active (last eruption was in 1963, which killed 1500 people), Agung dominates Balinese life, from its sacred place in daily life, to governing the island’s weather patterns. You can set your watch to the moist southwest morning winds as they crawl up the mountain, condense, and provide Balinese rice paddies with their daily soaking. Agung’s significance to Bali and the Balinese cannot be overstated.

Enough talk, let’s walk!…let’s climb this bad boy! As a 3000+ m alpine peak, Agung is a worthy objective. Reminiscent of the coolest chunks of rock back home in British Columbia, Agung did not disappoint. As an interesting aside, the classic way to climb Agung, and most peaks in Indo it seems, is to ascend during the night via headlamp, and thereby time the top-out with sunrise. Hmmm, not sure who invented that system, but we’ll stick to the daylight-hours scenario. I don’t know…call us old school. Isn’t looking around and experiencing the ascent, most of the enjoyment. Non?

The route, starting at Pura Pasar Agung, a temple half way up the mountain (which was very cool in itself) at about 1500 m, starts out as a classically overgrown forest trail, but then quickly transitions into steep rocky forest, and then into really steep and open volcanic rock for most of the route. Steep is the key word, and there are very few moments when you are not going straight up, or straight down. It’s that conical volcano-shape thing. There are 2 options: to the rim of the crater – a somewhat shorter and direct route to about 2900 m – or, to the true summit, a longer mission with a more convoluted (aka interesting) route involving a diagonal traverse. Our plan was the true summit, and we stuck to it.

It was an amazing day of being up high, volcanic rock formations, cool temps, and blue skies. You know, it was just good to be back in the mountains. Our guide, Nyoman (everything in Indo is guided, in fact, it’s illegal in most places to not have a guide, it’s the “support the locals” thing combined with a total lack of available information) was fantastic, mostly because he was over the age of 18, had actually done the route hundreds of times, and basically knew what he was doing and where we were going – not always the case with “guides” in this part of the world (e.g., see last post). If yer looking for a Gunung Agung guide, contact Nyoman (nyoman_mukti@yahoo.com).

It’s one of those routes where going down is harder on your body than going up. Our knees and legs were screaming when we got back to the car 10 hours after our sunrise start. But then, a wave of realization: oh ya, we’re in Bali! Beers on the beach! Nice! Hard to beat that.

Another cool aside, is our dear friend from Nelson, Kim Carpenter, who is currently reliving the book Eat, Pray, Love, for a couple of months in Bali, and who, through the miracle of internet communication, was spending the weekend with us at our hotel in Sanur. So that was fun. Back to the beach, beers in the pool, talking about the good ole’ Nelson days with Kim, then sunset cocktails and dinner on the beach under the stars. Life is good!

But alas, this story ends pretty much the same as the rest of them: all good things must come to an end. This was a weekend-warrior mission. Back to work tomorrow! Booo. I had to crowbar Amy off the beach and into our taxi to the airport. But we’ll be back, Bali is in our blood now J

Flores: Land of the Komodo Dragon

It’s fun being in a land of endless destinations. It’s Amy’s spring break. 5 work days off + a weekend on either side = 9 full days. Hmmm, where should we go next? After consulting our “wish list” of places to go – organized by required timeframe, seasonality, and activity type – we filtered for: one week, any season, beach (Amy wanted beach time). Output: Flores.

So what’s a Flores? Portuguese (who named the island) for “flowers”, Flores is one of the bigger islands making up this vast archipelago called Indonesia. Unlike Java, where we live, Flores is part of eastern Indonesia, otherwise referred to as Nusa Tenggara.  And, unlike Java, which contains 150 +/- million people, Flores is home to a mere 1.8 million – unpopulated by Indo standards, and a nice break from humanity for us. With direct 2.5-hr Garuda flights from Jakarta, it’s an “on the beach by noon” scenario. Gotta love that.

OK, where to begin. White-sand beaches, gin-clear water, coral reefs, world-class diving/snorkeling, island-hopping, volcanic craters, komodo dragons, flying foxes, manta rays…it’s a tropical island paradise bursting with endemic (science geek word meaning: not found anywhere else) wildlife. Very cool place indeed. While climbing to the top of a ridge one day, Amy and I both agreed it is among our top-10 most amazing places we have ever been.

Flores is really about 2 trips you need to choose from if you only have a week: (1) coastal, beaches, island hopping, or (2) inland, volcanoes, indigenous villages. We focussed on option 1 (Amy = beach = happy). The trip was sandwiched between two stints on a beach separated by a 3-day live-aboard boat mission in the middle. The beach days were awesome for the usual reasons…you know…working on the tan, chillin’, reading, walks on the beach, swimming in the ocean, snorkeling, renting a motorbike and cruising around, and of course, sunset drinkie-poos. We all know that drill. A highlight for us was the fact that it was low season, and we pretty much had the beach to ourselves – again such a rarity for us these days.

Beachy stuff aside, the true “oh-my-god” highlight of the trip was the 3-day boat trip. The basic layout of the area is centered around a town called Labuan Bajo, on the western tip of Flores (google it). The best thing about “Bajo” is that it has an airport. That’s really all you need to know about this scruffy town (well OK, a couple good restaurants maybe). The idea is to get out of town to one of the beach areas north of town, or if you are a rock star, out to one of the pricey island resorts. Then, once based, get yer skinny butt on a boat, and out into the tiny dots in the ocean that make up this stunning area.

In terms of boat options, we chose the private (i.e., only us), yet rustic, “deck only” option (i.e., no cabin) for our adventure. To be honest, price was the driving factor since these live-aboard boat trips are ridiculously expensive – ranging from ours, which was 400 bucks all-in, for 2-nights/3-days (rice and chicken, sleep on a piece of foam on the deck), to stratospheric prices of 500 bucks+ pp/pn (air con cabin, duvets, drinks on the top deck). Ahh, but the Amalia (our boat) was a fine craft, and Captain Hanka ran a tight ship. The weather was in our favour the whole time, so life on-deck was good. The young First Mate, up at first light making coffee, cheffed up surprisingly good grub. All and all, a fine ship and crew.

An “interesting” sidebar however, ranging from neutral to downright annoying, was “the kid”. In classic Indonesian style of “surprise!”, while boarding the boat in Bajo, on jumps a young fella, who our “agent” (i.e., guy we paid) points to and very succinctly states: “guide” and then “training”. Huh? Who? How? What the…? Whatever, too late, the motor was chuggin’ and the boat was moving. After a couple minutes of “who the h are you?”, we find out the kid is 17 years old, and never been on a trip like this, or to any of the places we’re going. We can only assume that was the “training” part. So ya, we were now in the rather interesting situation of having to parent a 17-yr-old kid for the next 3 days, who, aside from a phone in his back pocket, had nothing more with him than the jean shorts, t-shirt, and flip flops he was wearing. Welcome to Indonesia. What? You don’t want a 17-yr-old kid along on your private charter? Silly bules. Anyway, I’m over it (Amy might need more time).

So, the area is a shotgun blast of tiny, volcanic-origin, islands ringed by coral and gin-clear water. The volcanic thing, along with the contrast between verdant green mountains and turquoise water, is what makes everything so dramatic. Every bit of land is a piece of a volcano in various stages of evolution from cone formation, to eruption/explosion, to crater formation, to final disintegration and return to the sea.  

The sea life is over the top, making it one of the top snorkeling and diving locations on the planet. We both agree that it is most likely the best snorkeling we have ever experienced. I don’t ever remember being surrounding by hundreds, if not thousands of fish. It’s like snorkeling in 3-d. They’re all around you. Very cool. The most amazing thing is the seemingly endless array of multi-coloured species. At any one given time, you can easily count dozens of species. As a biologist, I am continually amazed at the diversity of species here, and many of them endemics! (that science geek word again).  

Speaking of endemics, the grand-daddy of ‘em all, and the reason we all showed up here today, is, wait for it: the Komodo Dragon (Varanus komodensis). Found nowhere else on the planet, and confined to only 5 small islands – a living dinosaur as they say – lives the largest lizard on the face of earth. These guys are huge! Imagine me, with a big beefy 2-m tail. That’s an average Komodo. The biggest of them can be twice as big. They are 100% carnivore, and go after big meals like deer and water buffalo. These guys are ferocious and have a mouth full of razor-sharp teeth. Surprisingly though, while it has happened, they rarely go after humans. Something about a guy getting attacked and killed in 2009….blah blah blah, whatever. We’re good, right? J

Only known to science since 1910, they live mostly on 2 islands: Komodo and Rinca. Obviously, both islands were highlights of our boat adventure. To give credit where credit is due, Indonesia has done a nice job of making the islands and surrounding ones into a park – Komodo National Park – and controlling human activity within the park. Upon arrival and paying our park fee, we were greeting by the mandatory park guide, who, armed with a forked stick (I offered to run back to the truck and grab the 12-gauge, but he said we were good – it was a pretty good solid stick), gave us the grand tour.  Even he was surprised that we “bumped into” 6 of the critters on our morning walk about, one of them a gigantic male. We were both shocked at how close we got to them…touching distance if you dare (careful, we need to remember what happened in 2009). Impressive beasts they are. A bit smelly.

Ah yes, another tropical volcanic island, another gigantic endemic lizard, maybe a snorkel stop, more endemic rainbow-coloured fish, another hike  up a volcanic ridge to see another crater ringed by coral, and then to our final anchoring spot for an end-of-day swim and sunset cocktails. Life is good. Total and absolute contentment. Wait….what the? what is that in the sky?…a bird, no, it’s a freakin’ huge bat! Followed by another several thousand, with a setting sun and crescent moon as a backdrop, we were witnessing yet another Komodo spectacle: the flying fox evening flight at Kalong Island. 

Also known as the Sunda flying fox (Pteropus vampyrus), they have nothing to do with foxes that fly (or vampires as the scientific name suggests). These are simply massive bats – imagine a gopher with wings. Hanging (literally) out in the mangroves during the day, they emerge at dusk in the thousands to fly to night-time feeding areas where they feed on fruit, nectar, and flowers (not your blood). Set against a sunset sky, the result is yet another amazing display of nature’s wonders. We sat speechless and simply watched the 30-minute show. Very very cool. Never seen anything like it. Being on the bow of a boat, bobbing up and down in a tropical ocean, was definitely surreal.

So, Flores…wow. As the saying goes, we just scratched the surface. I guess we’ll just have to come back! J