So I’m finally going to write about Komodo Dragons, one of the main reasons we obviously went trekking out to the Komodo National Park. We were lucky… we saw about 15 of them on Rinca Island (because we went on the two hour trek in the morning… the best time to see them) and probably about four at Komodo Island in the afternoon, mostly near the ranger’s huts. These are vicious beasts, and we got soooo scarily close to them. At each of the islands, you have to trek with a guide, who carries a long stick with a forked end with him. But seriously. If a 3m long 80kg komodo decides he’s hungry, our 50kg early-20s scrawny Indonesian guide and his magic komodo stick was not going to do much except become a crunchy hors d’oevre.
Had to give the kids props for their optimism though I must say. Our guides were also very well trained on answering hundreds of questions from us about the dragons and other wildlife in the national park.
And one of our guides did use his stick to prod one of the dragon’s tails to wake it up, so I guess it serves a safety purpose, yeah?
We learned a lot about the dragons, but here’s a quick lesson about these freaky big carnivorous lizards for y’all.
They are the main predators on the islands where they live (Rinca and Komodo). There’s also a small population of them on Flores island. They aren’t found anywhere else in the world. They can live as long as 50 years and are the largest living species of lizards in the world. They have razor sharp teeth, strong claws and septic saliva. They’ve killed humans on a couple of occasions.
Want more? Wikipedia it.
Septic saliva action! They bite their large prey, the prey is weakened by bleeding and the infection spreading through their body from the saliva… the komodo stalks them until they die, then they all tuck in. They can survive by eating only once a month, if they get a nice big meal.
A female guards her nest. The females dig lots of deep holes with their big claws, and only lay eggs in one of the holes. The rest are decoys. Sometimes they take over the burrows of other animals to save digging time. Once the baby komodos hatch (after nine months), they have to scramble into trees and live off bugs until they are at least five years old… otherwise, the other older dragons might eat them. Brutal!
This is komodo poo! It’s white, because the komodos eat all the bones of their prey (except sometimes the skull), so they get lots of calcium, hence white poo. That’s another indication of how powerful their teeth are… they can chomp through bone!
We learned a lot more about the dragons, they are really amazingly fascinating and freaky creatures. And you can only see them in the wild in Komodo National Park, so it’s definitely worth the trip (not to mention the stunning scenery out there, the amazing snorkelling in the park, etc etc etc etc… go!!!).
If you want to go, Rinca is your best bet for spotting dragons, because it is a smaller island with a similar komodo population to Komodo Island… so they are less spread out. Also, the morning is the best time to go, because they are often out sunning themselves. Before travelling, you should check out what time of the year it is in terms of the mating cycle as well, to optimize your chances of spotting dragons.
Rinca Island, one of the islands that make up the Komodo National Park and one of the islands that is home to Komodo Dragons, has a very ethereal and strange landscape. Dry and dusty with savanna grasses, but with odd tropical plants sticking out all over the place, including parasitic trees and palms. Some of it reminds me of Australia in a way, especially the dry grasses and shrubs, very little of it reminds me of Java or Sumatra. It’s certainly unique. We did go during the middle of the dry season though, so it might look different at other times of the year.
Woman selling fish at the pasar pagi (morning market) in Bima, Sumbawa.
… because I’m normally not into getting up too early. But when you are living on the deck of a little wooden boat cruising around Komodo National Park for three days, the first peeks of the sun are your alarm clock.
What an alarm clock, right? Absolutely stunning, not to mention that we could have been the only people in the world out there while this was happening. Oh the tranquility! (And I’m not being ironic about it like that film The Castle)… That is, until our little boat’s engine started again when it was time to head off for the day, which rather sounded like a jackhammer…
Mike and I had bought some martabak (pancake) on the street in Bima. Bima is on Sumbawa Island. We’d ended up there because while we’d been able to get flights out of Bali to go to Komodo National Park, there hadn’t been any empty seats coming back, so we’d had to catch an eight hour ferry to Sape then ride an overburned bus around twisty mountain roads, where each valley seemed to alternate between lush green rice fields and dusty abandoned ones, while listening to Celine Dion and other classic power ballads. An interesting detour, despite a brush or two with death where we were sure the bus was about to plunge down a cliff, but hey.
So we were in Bima for one night only. According to the ticket seller on the bus, life there was pretty hard. He had four kids and he said it was way too expensive for them to go to school. It was a struggle. He’d talked to me on the bus about it passionately in Indonesian. I hadn’t understood everything he said, but I did understand that the local district heads thought that was a problem that was just too hard to solve. Also, he was expected to pay the same fees as people who were much wealthier than him, and who had only one child, he said.
So here we were, eating martabak in the park in central Bima, dusty from the road and myself feeling a little bit of that guilt that often comes here when someone foists a problem on to you that you have no ability to solve. We’d had a good dinner though, the night was cool, we weren’t in the office and the martabak was tasty, so there was plenty to smile about.
Then we spotted some local kids running around wearing garbage bags as makeshift costumes, which gave us even more laughs. I asked one of the boys what he was trying to be and he replied “Dracula”! They were charging around, scrambling over and jumping off all the run down civic structures in the square.
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At dusk, hundreds of thousands of fruit bats lift off Pulau Kalong in Komodo National Park and fly off to the surrounding islands to search for food. It’s an amazing sight, difficult to capture the full extent on a camera in the dark on a tiny fishing boat with no tripod. But wow, it was pretty damn cool. Just a stream of bats against the darkening sky.
My trip to the Komodo National Park off Flores was amazing and we saw lots of Komodo Dragons (yay!), but I’m still fairly tired and not feeling the writing mojo tonight since my dear friend Mike caught his plane back to the states tonight and I’m going to miss him bunches and bunches, so will make full posts about all the amazement later.
