Island hopping

This post was meant to be sent last week, but with connectivity issues were not able to send it. The Kanawa experience will be posted in next few days. 

Im afraid this entry will be shorter than normal, as our boat for Kanawa island is shortly departing. It is our final destination before coming back to Bali for a few final days, and there is no electricity there. It is a small island close to Flores and Komodo Island. Can you guess what animal lives in Komodo?  If your guess was beasts of fantasy and legends then you are correct. From Kanawa we want to take a day trip and see the legendary Komodo dragon in its natural habitat! AWESOME.  But how did we get this far from Bali? 

Well, a few days after our last days volunteering, we did a night climb of Mt. Batur and were able to catch the sunrise. We climbed with a gent from ze France, and had fun speaking ze French avec il. We were also surprised to meet a family of monkeys living at the top of the mountain, well I guess a more accurate description would be active volcano. Steam came out of many holes and the most recent eruption occurred in 2004! We received nourishment at the top and were stoked because we were told we would get an egg and banana bread once we reached the summit. I guess we got just that because along with the hardboiled egg, was banana slices stuck between two pieces of wonder bread… I ate mine, Emily passed on hers:)

                A few days later we went to the legendary party island off the coast of Lombok; Gili Trawangan.  Now, despite being in that party atmosphere with bars lining the beaches and locals asking if we want this or that, we were too busy getting certified to independently SCUBA dive anywhere in the world! So over 4 days, we were able to take 4 dives and see some incredible things! Turtles, octopi, eels, and sharks, not to mention the myriad other fish we saw enjoying the coral reef surrounding the island. Im afraid we have no pictures of things SCUBA related yet, but hopefully we will get a dive or two in on Kanawa and take some pics then. Other noteworthy things is that locals like the saying "why not" as a response to many questions. Ex) At a restaurant, asking the waiter for a drink he responds "why not" (made me giggle). Also many many cats are here, and no dogs like the many in Bali.

                Our trip to the Flores area is worth mentioning, if only for the fact that it took 31 hours to get there over 3 ferries, 2 busses, a van, a taxi, and a horse driven cart. We were told on Gili that it would take about half that time and all be on 1 boat by our lovely travel agent. The good part was that we were experiencing areas very few foreigners go through, in fact after we got to Lombok from Gili T, we were the only white people! We were famous, and many people took pictures of us regardless of if we cared or not. These girls were probably the cutest example of this. The bad part is that it was terrible. Em and I both took an oath not to complain on the ride there, but now that it is over prepare for a mini rant. Bus drivers don’t care about you because they blast (bad)  indo music at you til 11pm, then start it up again at 430am. The company doesn’t care about you because they cram more luggage in the bus than space and shove it in the aisles, then cram more people than seats and put those people on the luggage. And the people spread out and spill stuff on you and stick their feet in my seat area, while due to bad maintenance air conditioning fluid leaks on me from the ceiling. Even MORE people come on at some stops and try to sell you stuff. Em cant sleep for a bit because a cockroach ran by her arm and later had ants all over her bag. Since we don’t speak Indonesian and no one spoke English, we were never entirely sure we were going to end up where we wanted. We did end up where we wanted however, and are now taking a short breather in a nice hotel with this view.  So now that we are all clean and rested, it is time to undertake 4 days paradise in a private island.

In Labuanbajo, this is the view from the hotel.

 We will fly back to Bali.