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Mark Moxon's Travel Writing

Indonesia: Moni

View of Moni
The peaceful town of Moni

Five hours after leaving Bajawa I arrived in Moni unscathed1 and checked into the Hiddayah Bungalows, a lovely collection of bamboo huts clustered next to some paddy fields on the uphill side of the village. As I wasn't feeling too great and had a bit of a sore throat from all the kretek smoke and dusty roads (though no fever, so there was no worry that it might be malaria), I figured I'd take a day off and relax, and that's precisely what I did the next day, sitting on my balcony, drinking Indonesian tea (no milk, lots of sugar, delicious flavour), visiting the local market and waterfall, and generally watching the world wander past.

Dried fish for sale in Moni Market
Dried fish for sale in Moni Market
The blue lake at Keli Mutu
The blue lake at Keli Mutu
Hiddayah Bungalows
Hiddayah Bungalows

1 Well, physically unscathed at least. With my musical sensibilities I found the hardest part of the journey to be the music, played at decibel levels that the British police would claim justified all those arrests, m'lud. Every bus has two tapes, one in Indonesian and one in English, and they're both absolutely abysmal; these tapes are played on auto-reverse for the entire journey, so by the end you know the lyrics to everything (even though you don't know what they mean), and for days these god-awful ditties lilt through the subconscious, gnawing at the soul until you're left weeping on the sidewalk. That's just my humble opinion, of course; I'm sure that some people find Indonesian bus music to be the epitome of symphonic excellence. Like the Indonesians, for example, who sing along like people possessed, not exactly adding to the listening experience...