On Monday 25th September I decided to strike east from Senaru, heading in the general direction of the island of Flores, from where a passenger ship would depart for Sulawesi on October 3rd. I got offered a ridiculously high-priced ticket from Senaru to Flores by a local tout, but turned it down: he wanted 85,000rp for a trip that ended up costing me about 35,000rp, and he would have been using a ferry that turned out to be non-existent, an unsurprising discovery for this tout-weary cynic. Public bemos took me, bruised and cramped, to Labuhan Lombok on the eastern side of Lombok, crammed between locals with live chickens, dead expressions and suspicious eyes: one bemo even had to stop and fill a flat tyre with air, before it could crunch and grind its way through the dusty northeast of Lombok. In Labuhan Lombok I alighted, got grabbed by a tout trying to persuade me to come to his hotel for information on a ticket to eastern Sumbawa, and figuring there could be worse options I hopped on his bike. It turned out to be a good move.
Chris, the Indonesian proprietor of the losmen, turned out to be extremely helpful, very well tuned in to travellers (speaking English, French, German, Indonesian and a smattering of other languages, having spent a fair amount of time travelling in Europe), and it didn't take much to part me from a paltry 27,000rp to buy passage from Lombok, across to Sumbawa, and almost right across that long island to Bima, from where a bemo would take us to Sumbawa's eastern port of Sape; the ferry to Flores, bypassing Komodo, would leave at 8am on Friday morning. Perfect.
Yeah, right. Ever been on a long bus journey? Well, take it and double the pain. Add in steaming temperatures; shocking roads; a driver who only knows how to accelerate at full whack and brake suddenly, often at the same time; a TV blaring out a terrible kung fu movie from America1, subtitled in Indonesian and guaranteed to hard boil even the most vacuous of brains; incessant Indonesian music, turned up loud, all through the night, making me think of an Indonesian Demis Roussos mixed with an awful Bontempi organ; sweaty locals, sitting next to you and falling asleep on you, kretek2 ash dropping onto your trousers as the smoke licks round the holes in the seats; cockroaches crawling up your legs; a time schedule to disturb even the deepest of sleepers (leaving at 2pm, arriving at 2am... which actually turned into 4.30am); even the Australian long distance bus wasn't this bad, but it's unfair to complain when you look at the price.
Luckily I met a very pleasant French couple on the way, Luc and Marilyn, providing each of us with someone at whom to glance sideways every time something straight out of a disaster movie occurred (which was pretty much all the time). Sleeping sporadically and in positions normally reserved for tantric yoga, we eventually reached Flores, arriving at the western port of Labuanbajo on Friday afternoon, after yet another kung fu movie on the ferry's TV. Hi-ya!
1 Every bloody American kung fu movie has the same plot. Boy trains himself in ju-jitsu/kung fu/karate, is driving through the city, finds girl being attacked by no-good gang, beats the crap out of gang and saves girl, gets seen in the process by an old eastern mystic who used to be a wicked fighter in his youth, old man trains boy even more, boy goes on to enter and win big contest, in the process destroying a huge drugs/firearms cartel. Oh, and the acting's really shit. Now can I have my US$10,000 for the screenplay, please? Thank you.
2 Indonesian cigarettes, or kreteks, are something else. As well as tobacco they contain cloves, which means the smoke smells very strange and the things leave a sweet, herbal taste on your lips. They're not that bad, but smoking a whole packet would be in the same league as eating a whole jar of Marmite, or sucking a whole packet of Polos in one go. Intense... but then again, so is the nicotine rush, because if there's one thing that kreteks are, it's strong. Which could explain the state of the locals' lungs...
