Photo Time

Let’s have some photos, shall we?  We are in Bali right now and have fast internet; we have to take advantage of that!

This is Sally and me at the top of Mt. Kelimutu on Flores Island, Indonesia.  Those are these crater lakes that change colors from time to time.

 

 

Here is Sally trying to take a monkey home on the way up Kelimutu. It didn’t work.

 

 

We went to Church in the village of Moni.  That was super cool.  Most of the island is Catholic so they were cool with us.

 

 

Sally and our guide are eating passionfruit that this lady gave us.  We took a guide around on motorcycles to check out some local flavor.  Well worth it.

 

I had to ride my own motorcycle.  Mercifully, Sally rode on the back of our guide’s.  Turns out riding a motorcycle is pretty similar to a bike.

 

We visited a really traditional village and walked in on lunch.  I love doing that.  They felt obliged to feed us.  Check out the bowls they eat out of—made of palm leaves.

 

Here is the village.  Tall houses help to drain away the rain from the thatch.  Plus they are cooler in the heat.  They also look fancy.

 

 

After the village we hit a river where a hot spring and a cool river meet to create the perfect temperature.  There were lots of local kids there who thoroughly harassed us while we there.

Komodo Island is just off of Flores Island and we went to check these guys out.  Komodo dragons really are big.  They can eat deer and small people.

 

 

 

 

 

Diving was next which was amazing!  The ride out wasn’t bad either.

 

 

 

 

 

 

We are in Bali on our way to Borneo next.  More to come!

"I am disturbed."

Moni, Flores. Indonesia

Outside of the village of Moni on Flores Island, there is a volcano called Kelimutu with three multi-colored crater lakes in it.  We went on a crisp morning and were lucky because the overnight rain had cleared and the clouds rolled away in the light breeze. We hopped on the back of two ojeks (motor bikes) and were driven up the mountain to the entrance gate by men who didn’t speak any English and who smelled like a mixture of cologne, clove cigarettes, and questionable breath.

It’s a short hike up to the rim of the crater to view the lakes. One is turquoise blue, one turquoise green, a color so deep it looked like paint, like the light couldn’t penetrate its depths. The other was a deep emerald green. This is a sacred place for locals, where souls go when they die, age determining which lake you end up in.  On the way up, some rabbits hopped by.  Or were those small dogs?  No wait, MONKEYS!  Long-tailed macaques to be exact.  We followed them for a bit, snapping photos as they looked for food under bushes and inside of plastic bags.  I begged to take one home.

We had the place mostly to ourselves but, as we were leaving, a fair number of local tourists showed up, enjoying the craters. The craters weren’t the only thing that interested them that day though. At the summit, two guys approached Brian and asked if they could have their photo taken with him. So, I snapped the photo – first with their camera, then with ours.

 

On our way back down the mountain, a large group of local tourists were coming up to the viewpoint. They held their phones up, taking quick photos of us as we passed. One man came up to me, stopping me in my tracks and said, “Hello. I am disturbed. I am photo you?” 

The excitement of the day was in our spotting the monkeys and getting to see a primate that we don’t usually see. For the local, however, there was a different primate that they don’t usually see.  Here, we are the monkeys.

Inggrish, please

We have a lot to learn if we're going to travel the world.

It's officially day 1 of our travels, and it's amazing we made it this far. Amazing we got out of Fiji in the first place.

Our two years of traveling on twin otter puddle jumpers, through airports where a conversation about where you are from is more important than security measures have given us a false sense of air travel. We arrived at the airport this morning without visas to our next destination, with way too many ounces in our carry-on baggage, and absolutely no foreign currency. We were reprimanded in Australia for not being at our gate three hours in advance and barely made our flight to Bali.


But make it, we did. And we're safe and sound and happy to be abroad. We're also enjoying the lightening-speed internet at our hostel. (We had no idea the rest of the world was operating at this speed!) When I logged on to post this blog, everything "google" was in the Indonesian language (what that is, we haven't yet figured out). I had to change my preference to English, and the option I chose was "Inggrish."

Of course, I'm still answering "Io" (the Fijian yes) to every question, though I imagine that as Fiji becomes a distant memory, so will the language.

Moce.

'O La'i Vei?

We start our travels from a unique place, a unique perspective. We are leaving our home in Fiji and embarking on an adventure unlike any we have taken before: continuing to explore the world's cultures, only in brief snapshots.

In Fiji, part of the standard greeting is to ask "Where are you going?" It's akin to how we ask "How are you?" in English. At first, it really put us off. Why do you want to know where I'm going? Who cares where I'm going? But then we learned that an acceptable answer is just "Over there."

Today, though, we have a different answer. We're going to Indonesia.

So, we say "Moce mada" to this beautiful island home, to this culture which has welcomed us with open arms and full plates of food. We leave an understanding of this place and its people and enter a world that is unknown to us. We will truly be travelers on the road as we attempt to navigate new and foreign cultures.

And therein lies the adventure.