The half-hour crossing from Bangsal across to Meno helped fine-tune the mother of all hangovers, so very happy to chill out and watch the luggage at a beach café within feet of where the boat had dropped us, leaving the hotel hunting to my buddies. This is a serious business – the Gilis are not…
Bangsal beach deserves it’s reputation as one of the planet’s premier armpits. You’re not paranoid – everyone IS out to scam you.
After Rinca the captain turned us Northwest to cross the Lombok strait, after which we would hug the thinly populated coast of Sumbawa on our way to Lombok.
Leaving the mirror smooth open sea, an appropriately mysterious-looking inlet took our boat heart-of-darkness-lite-style up to a mooring point just a short dinghy ride away from landfall on Rinca.
For the next two nights and two days I’d be on the Perama boat, heading west from Labuan Bajo to Lombok, via stops on Rinca, Gili Moyo, the village of Labuan Haji and Gili Laba.
I’m a novice diver, so Komodo NP was a pretty steep learning curve. Dive sites were typically in the lee of exposed seamounts – where the water would be slack, in theory…
My temporary home, Bayview Gardens Hotel, sits on a jungle covered hill above the port – a handful of cottages built on terraces hacked out of the hillside, linked by steep jungle paths and each fronted with an amazing wooden terrace to admire the world-beating sunsets. Adrian, the owner, is your typical Dutch ex-hippy, now…
Labuan Bajo is a warm, shabby little place – fishing port, dive centre and transit hub for budget travellers heading East into Flores.
A new experience at check-in this morning – queue, present ticket, weigh checked baggage and then the unexpected request – “Sir, stand on scales please…” – the four staff behind the desk didn’t even try to suppress their giggles when the kg scale flipped into triple digits and kept on rolling. This made me expect…
The Low Cost Carrier Terminal at KLIA is a scruffy, poorly designed collection of concrete boxes – you can get a coffee and something to eat, but very little else – large swathes of the bag-drop and check-in area don’t have air-conditioning, and even at 7am things are hot and humid. But, this is still…
