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.
Tweet 
Delicious 
Digg 
Facebook 
Ping 
Stumble
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.
[keep reading…]
Tweet Delicious Digg Facebook Ping Stumble
Sunset overlooking the Melaka Strait.
Am about to make lots of blogs about Melaka/Malacca (will stick to one spelling from now on, just making it clear it’s the same place) in Malaysia, where I just spent the weekend, as well as a day in Singapore. OMG I took so many photos and ate so much food! Prepare for Melaka overload.
Here’s some pics of the UNESCO heritage listed town centre to get us started.
PS. The blog will get back to its regularly scheduled Indonesia blogging soon! Been away so much lately!
Tweet Delicious Digg Facebook Ping Stumble
Local kids playing soccer on the beach at Pelabuhan Ratu.
I never would have considered myself “an outdoors type”. But after two months in Jakarta, shuttling from one airconditioned space to the next in airconditioned taxis, trying to avoid breathing the polluted air outside, I was feeling a little crazy.
In Sydney, you escape the city or work stress by relaxing down by the harbour or at the beach or in one of the stunning parks that overlooks the water. I actually spent quite a lot of time outdoors in Sydney, and even when driving I would have the windows down, gulping down that coastal air.
So it was absolute bliss to escape Jakarta this weekend to Pelabuhan Ratu, just a couple of hours out of Jakarta by car, to BREATHE and just be OUTSIDE all weekend! I didn’t even care about the mosquitoes, I just wanted to feel alive! We hired a driver and escaped when the others had finished work at midnight on Friday… a night time dash down windy roads through little villages to our destination.
Dubbed the “crazy house” by some, the “Dr. Seuss” house by others, we were crashing a 10-bedroom-and-god-knows-how-many-bathrooms house set high on a clifftop overlooking the beaches and the jungle. It was called Karang Aji Villa, and you can visit the website to see more pictures and to try and understand just how mad it was.
There were more people than beds, so I crashed on a sofa outside (yes, so desperate was I for the outdoors, I even slept outside despite not having a mosquito net). The mozzies were annoying, it was pretty hot, and I didn’t have a good sleep, but the things that woke me besides the sqweetos didn’t disappoint. The crowing of a rooster alerted me of the sunrise, and lying on my sofa I had a panoramic view of the sun coming up over the Indian Ocean, the water dotted with fisherman’s boats. And just like everywhere else in Indo, you can’t escape the loud loud loud morning prayers…
We didn’t get the full grasp of the crazy house until the morning. It was a psychadelic mix of Balinese-style wood carvings, bright plastic panels, stained glass, statues, bamboo furniture and tiny spiral staircases, all the way up to a somewhat wobbly “viewing platform”. I’ve never seen anything like it. But the views were gorgeous.
We were sharing the house with friends of a friend of ours who were celebrating a birthday. They were all Australians (except for one Austrian… she just needed a few more letters), and they were all doing interesting work here in Indonesia as part of the AusAid Youth Ambassador program.
Partying at the “crazy house”.
So we spent most of the weekend swimming, chilling, eating (including fresh grilled fish, of course), playing a bit of beach soccer until we noticed all the glass and nails and stuff in the sand, drinking, wandering a bit, talking a lot, reading, being rained on and not caring. And breathing lots and lots of relatively fresh air.
And I finally feel like I have seen some of the “real Indonesia”. As in, not shopping malls. Rice paddies, little villages, plantations, extreme dangerous driving, fishing boats etc etc. I want to see so much more.
But it was nice. Invigorating. Much needed. I was so busy relaxing I didn’t even take that many photos. I’ve been slack as lately. I have more, but Flickr is being even slacker than me so I might have to post them later when it decides to stop being fickle.
Tweet Delicious Digg Facebook Ping Stumble
The restaurant chain Din Tai Fung rocks my world. It rocks a lot of people’s worlds, judging by the queue at some of its stores in Singapore.
We also have DTF here in Jakarta, and a branch opened in Sydney just before I left Oz, so this is a food rant that knows no geographical bounds.
The soup filled dumplings, or Xiao Long Bao, are amazing. They are handmade, always have at least 10 delicate folds, and in lots of stores, you can see the hatted and face masked people making them in a glass windowed kitchen.
They burst in your mouth, full of flavour. The tastiest dumplings I have ever eaten in my life. And I love them, so I have eaten a lot. Sadly, in Jakarta, we don’t have them with pork because pork isn’t very popular in this mostly Muslim nation, but they are still really good with chicken as a substitute. But I had the pork and crab dumplings in Singapore though, and life, including dumplings, is better with pork… sorry Muslim friends.
Everything else is good there too. The wantons. The vegetables. The steamed buns. The gyoza. The neverending supply of tea, filled up so quickly, you can’t keep track of how many litres you may have consumed. I’ve been a couple of times, this wasn’t all in one sitting!
So if you have a Din Tai Fung in your city… GO! I implore you. It’s worth having to wait for a table.
Tweet Delicious Digg Facebook Ping Stumble
One of the best things about Singapore is the food. The hawker centres offer such a great variety, the cultural fusion of Singapore’s inhabitants mean you can get some pretty special nosh for a pretty good price. I was back in Singapore again for another visa run (hopefully the last for quite some time), and I spent the weekend gorging myself on Singaporean delights like Hainese Chicken Rice, Laksa, BBQ Pork Buns and more.
One of the things I tried that I didn’t get a chance to try last time was Fried Carrot Cake. It comes in two varieties, white or black. I went with the sweet black kind, which was all manner of wonderful. The main ingredient is white radish, which is known as white carrot in Singapore, hence the name. White radish is pretty awesome, I have had it before at a vegan restaurant in Sydney. It has a reall robust taste, especially when fried.
Some of the hawker food around is pretty crazy, especially some of the sweet stuff. Because I am an adventurous sort, I was at a dessert stand at one of the hawker centers and decided to go for the weirdest dessert on the menu.
Peanut and Corn Sweet Ice.
All the other ices were fruit flavoured. But no, that’s boring.
Despite looking a bit like vomit on ice (some might argue that’s the same as Disney on Ice), it actually wasn’t bad at all. It just tasted like sweet peanut, with chunks of corn, on ice. A bit weird, but not unpleasant. Down the bottom there were bits of jelly and sweet red kidney beans.
One of the other hawker places I found myself at was satay street. I didn’t eat any, because satay is pretty run of the mill in Indonesia so I was focusing more on the food you can’t get as readily here, but it was interesting. The stalls along the street only sold satay, so of course, the competition was fierce. Which meant the hawkers weren’t going to let you walk peacefully down the street. And they didn’t stick with the polite Indonesian “hello misses” either.
“Hello sexy, come here to eat, I will find you a beautiful boy to sit with you.”
“Where are you from? I know exactly how to make satay that Australians will like.”
“You are walking away? You are breaking my heart!” (complete with mime of heart being ripped from chest).
Intense but comical.
Tweet Delicious Digg Facebook Ping Stumble
My eye must have been wheely caught by the rickshaws on my trip to Singapore this time. I just came back with heaps of photos of them and I don’t really know why. Here’s a couple.
This one isn’t really about the rickshaws. I just thought it was an interesting contrast between those who wheel for leisure and those who wheel for life.
At the Esplanade at sunset.
In Chinatown.
Tweet Delicious Digg Facebook Ping Stumble
Food at a little eatery in Little India, Singapore. For SG $6, you got as much tasty curry and rice as your heart could ever desire. Bliss.
Is it just me, or could a lot of the world’s dilemmas be solved if everyone just ate off banana leaves? No washing up. Biodegradable. In tropical climes, a never ending supply. Waterproof. Greaseproof. It’s the world’s perfect packaging. And it looks kind of trendster too…
Ma’af the blog has been neglected. Our newspaper has been launching, I was in Singapore for a while for visa reasons and I am trying to learn bahasa Indonesia (which involves remembering how exactly to do that thing they call “studying”).
I also have tons of photos to post but my home internet connection is waging a war on Flickr. It will upload photos, and then won’t let me see them… it’s very weird.
Will post more soon.
But for now, just ponder the wondeful-ness of banana leaves. What other problems could they solve? So many possibilities….
Tweet Delicious Digg Facebook Ping Stumble
