Indonesia/Philippines May 2010
Escaping Eyjafjallajökull
Remember the golden age of air travel – elusive sophistication out of reach of all but the chosen few, jetting off from art deco lounges? Well, I can’t believe that ever applied to Birmingham Airport.
Epic fail on the baggage carousel lottery
Tweet 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…
East to Flores and Labuan Bajo
Tweet 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…
Bemos, ojaks and one-way systems
Labuan Bajo is a warm, shabby little place – fishing port, dive centre and transit hub for budget travellers heading East into Flores.
Dive days and lazy evenings in Komodo National Park
Tweet 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,…
Dive days and lazy evenings in Komodo NP (part 2)
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…
Cruising back West to Lombok
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.
Dragonspotting on Rinca
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.