Where the fish fly…

Our 47 hour ferry from Bali to Labuan Bajo left at 9.00 p.m. which gave us the chance to have a lazy morning and get Theo a straw hat, and a shirt for my sisters wedding.

We had a sweet moment with the shirt seller – Theo and he had spoken every day, he was a friendly warm person and ran one of our local street stalls. Theo was clear if he was buying a shirt it was from ‘shirt guy’. He went in search of the best colour and I wandered down a few minutes behind. He’d found one he liked but because Theo is colour blind he often asks me to get involved in his clothing choices. To be fair it looked nice when he held it up but there was one on the stall opposite that might have suited him better and Theo’s shirt guy didn’t have that colour. I asked the older woman on that stall to get it down for us so we could at least compare the colours and she discreetly explained, using her hands and facial expressions, that she was not getting that shirt down…this was her neighbours sale and the shirt Theo had chosen was a good choice!

I loved that…it showed me a community spirit amongst the small traders that is more important than a sale.

…and then we went to buy the hat and that was fun too. The straw hat seller was an older man and he wasn’t down with the haggling. He started with a really high price – then swooped down to what he thought was sensible real quick and we were done, no street theatrics and arm waving with straw hat man 🙂

We ate our last meal in our local, bought a bit extra as takeaway and headed for the bus.

The first bus refused to stop because the bus stop marked on our map was 100 yards in the wrong direction – we moved and waited.

We met Kevin on that next bus, Kevin was from Peru, a tour guide from Lake Titicaca who had been travelling around Asia for ten months. He was interesting and interested – the journey flew by, we told him about our adventures in Russian and China and he told us that he had hired a motorbike on Flores and gone all over the island. He had been invited to a ceremony in one village where they were sacrificing some animals, the old religions keep pace with Catholicism and Islam on Flores.

When it came time to change buses the next bus came along quickly and we heaved ourselves up the slightly too high, slightly too narrow space for getting into buses carrying big rucksacks. I confidently tapped my card on the card machine …and nothing happened. I tried all three cards, and they didn’t work. I quickly did the maths, We had started with 50,000 on each card, it was 4,400 a journey, we’d done seven journeys – we had loads of money left. Either the bus driver who sold us the cards had made a swift 20,000 from each of us  or the price that showed up on the machine each time I tapped the ticket had another charge I didn’t know about.

The driver wanted us off the bus.

He was clear we needed to put more money on our cards… we had no idea how or where to do that so I offered to pay by cash, ‘No’ – credit card? – ‘No’

…my limpet instincts kicked in at this point.

We needed to stay on this bus, we still had an hours walk to the ferry from where we wanted to get off and the delay at the beginning had put a dent in our safety margin.

I explained the maths, several times, telling him in detail about how we had paid 50,000 for each card and only made seven journeys and that therefore there should be loads of money left on each card, that we had just got off another bus and the cards had clearly been working on that bus, that we needed to catch a ferry, really soon …I didn’t lose it but I knew we had no other choice, and I also didn’t understand what had gone wrong.

We were the only people on the bus so he could have refused to drive – he could have called the police or his supervisor, but he didn’t and eventually he started driving the bus.

We sat quite tensely waiting for him to change his mind but when other passengers came on we relaxed a little, it seemed he had understood my genuine confusion and desperation and enough of my story to feel some compassion …or he just wanted to get home for his tea.

As we neared our stop I went and thanked him and said that the next time we were on a red Bali bus we would all pay double. He smiled faintly and we parted, if not on good terms at least on slightly better terms…

The heat hit us when we got off the bus and the walk to the ferry was a sweaty 3 km. we turned off the bus route onto the side of a motorway, and walked most of the way along the hard shoulder …after a while there was only one destination and having crossed the slip road, carefully, there started to be occasional pavement and less traffic.

My ‘what if this isn’t the actual ferry port’ fears began to kick in half way there – when I’d pointed at my map in the Pelni Ferry Ticket Office the guy behind the counter had nodded and smiled but only said ‘Benoa’. Benoa was a big port covering the whole of this area of the Island…I reminded myself that the map did actually say ‘ferry port’ on it and kept walking.

There were two good things about my slight state of panic, firstly the adrenaline had me powering up the hard shoulder and secondly I had no time to think about spending 47 hours on a boat.

It was the right port – the tense moment when we handed over our tickets to the first official we met passed sweetly away as he nodded and pointed towards where we needed to go.

It was busy this boat – we queued, swapped pieces of paper for printed tickets – joined another queue to get our hands stamped, made our way through the hustle and bustle of large cardboard boxes being heaved on to carts and hauled towards the ship and there it was – the aptly named ‘HMS Nemesis’.

I actually have no idea what the ship was called …that’s just how I was feeling about 47 hours in a boat that looked a lot smaller than the one from Jakarta and in a storm I had a feeling ‘bigger was better’, not much I could do about it now though…

We filed up the weirdly shaped metal stairs and were met by the sunny Rafael, the boats chief steward, who showed us to our cabin …which was horrible.

‘My cell in prison was nicer than this…’ I said and asked for a cabin with a window.

‘This is your cabin madam…!’

‘But it’s not fit for humans’ I replied – ‘Pigs and goats would be unhappy in here!’, I said.

He smirked and said ‘like it or lump it madam, you get what you pay for…’

Actually we had quite a respectful and polite conversation where I explained I thought we had booked a cabin with a window and that Rosa and I felt less sick if we could see out…

After five minutes Rafael and the lovely Arif, another steward in a slightly less fancy uniform, showed us another room – two beds with space between them, a window and a table – yes there were baby cockroaches in the bathroom, and on the windowsill, but compared to the ‘hole’ it was an oasis.

We had to wait for an hour to see if anyone else had booked ‘Nemesis Villas’ which gave Theo and I enough time to have a bit of a row about which room we liked best and why…

His point was that there were four beds rather than two in cabin number one, however much of a dingy hole it was, mine was I’d rather sleep on the floor in ‘cockroach manor’ than spend a minute in that horrible disgusting place.

We agreed that the decision could be made for us in the form of someone having booked that cabin or not…and luckily my resolve to move into the horrible room without complaint, if that’s where fate decided, was unnecessary.

Our stewarding team came and got us, they brought us an extra mattress which fit perfectly between the beds and I started making friends with the permanent scuttling residents of our cabin.

The boat set sale just after nine and we were all asleep pretty quickly. When I woke up at 4.30 the next day I got up stealthily, careful not to wake Mrs Cockroach or any of her babies by turning the light on.

It was fabulous out on deck. Purple skies hinting at dawn…smooth calm seas. My little song that had been bubbling away since our last boat journey took a little more shape as I sang softly to the ocean.

I could see the light coming, reds and oranges heralding the suns arrival – and there she was, a glint at first but within two minutes she was fully in the sky…I was washed in the simplicity of it all when out of the soft blue of the ocean a dolphin popped up…it did that glide through the water thing they do, nose first tail last. I hardly had time to hug myself before another one broke the surface.

All I wanted to do was rush back and wake everyone up – but I didn’t, the dolphins would be long gone by the time my two sleepyheads got out here and they both needed to sleep as long as possible.

I watched the sea for an hour more and then went back to the cabin to sit and wait patiently for my little family to wake up so I could tell them about …THE DOLPHINS!

They were so excited, we all chorused our family motto: ‘where’s there’s one camel there’s sure to be more…’ We ate breakfast, thank you very much Pelni ferries, and decided we would spend the day on deck, Rosa felt less sick when she could see the sea and we all wanted to spend the day watching for dolphins.

We manoeuvred our way towards the seat at the far end of the starboard  side of the boat (…I have no idea which side of the boat it was but it’s a fifty-fifty chance I got it right and it’s not like anyone can prove me wrong). The seat had a good view through the railings and only one man sitting on it.

Rosa and I joined him and spent forty minutes watching our first sightings of flying fish accompanied by the sounds of the warrior sword fighting game our companion was playing on his phone. The same sword fight noises happening repeatedly every few seconds.

It was tempting to try and find somewhere else to sit but he was a nice man and this was the perfect spot (…I can still hear the sword slicing noises now 🙂

We leaned over the railings taking in the wonder that a fish could actually have little tiny wings (cut slash – death) – their little glittery bodies highlighted for us by the sun. We kept pointing them out to each other (slash thrust – death) and occasionally a small group would leap out together (…mega cut slash – death – ‘you have moved up a level!’).

Eventually our game player stopped for a cigarette and we scanned the horizon in brief peace before a new onslaught began.

After about an hour he wandered off for a pee or a coffee and we moved in for the day. Camp dolphin had plenty of water and enough snacks to keep Mrs Cockroach in food until our return journey…

We had just seen a really long flight by a spectacular flying fish when Theo pointed down right by the side of the boat.

‘What is that?’

None of us knew…it was big, over three metres long – green and speckled and had a really big flat head. It was sooooo exciting and we all saw it, just floating there ten feet or so under the water!

We decided it was a shark of some kind but we didn’t have any internet so ‘green speckled shark’ would have to do.

What a day 🙂

After another hour Theo and Rosa went to get tea and sword thrust warrior guy came back to sit on the next seat, the fainter tones of his game accompanied what could possibly be my first ever sighting of a whale.

I saw a spout way off in the distance, I leapt to my feet and watched. Whatever it was didn’t broke the surface but I saw it (or them) spout six or seven times in quick succession. Was it a whale? Did other sea creatures spout? Did Theo and Rosa see it…? I have shared my crappy little video with three people and I have had two whales and a dolphin, so the juries out still – I’ll find me an expert somewhere along the line …apparently experts know the different whales from their spouts so I might even find out what sort of whale/dolphin it was.

…I was so excited, but sad not to have shared it.

We continued scouting the sea for the rest of the daylight hours and in the afternoon saw a huge group of dolphins far off in the distance with baby dolphins doing aerial acrobatics.

When it started getting dark we headed back in to the cabin and I glanced at Rosa’s face. She was bright red and mine felt pretty hot too…I looked over at Theo, never normally affected by the sun, and he was a lobster as well…

Somehow we had got sunburned sitting in the shade?! Was it UV reflected off the sea? Was it wind burn? (…is there such a thing?! It hadn’t even been particularly windy!)

We hit the Aloe Vera face masks our cousin had given us in Thailand and lay in cooling bliss – until we had to take them off, and then we were red and hot, hot, hot.

I woke up at 4.00 the next morning, smothered myself in Aloe Vera and went for an explore. Everyone was pouring off the ship, we had arrived in Waingapu on Sambu Island and as I walked freely round the decks it looked like we three were the only people left on the boat.

I watched the crew cleaning and clearing out all the rubbish we’d created. I stopped and watched the rubbish collection lorry load up and then saw four men carrying off a body wrapped in a shroud. ‘Coming home’ I thought and sent some love to the family of whoever that was…

We didn’t spend much time outside the next day – the extreme sunburnedness of our faces calling for mercy – but all in all we saw dolphins five times, lots of glittery, fluttery flying fish, and some great sea birds …as well as our maybe whale and as yet unnamed shark. We really started to get a sense of how much of a home the ocean was to the myriad of life that inhabited its underwater depths.

The sea had remained as calm as you could possibly hope for…the food was better than on the first ship, and it was looking like we were going to arrive early…

We headed out on deck for the last hour as we glided smoothly between mostly uninhabited volcanic islands. We wanted to get our first glimpse of Labuan Bajo – yet another town we had never heard of and the launchpad for our Flores Island adventures.

It proved to be worth the effort, as behind an assortment

of fishing boats, yachts, dinghy’s and pirate ships we saw a higgledy piggledy picturesque town ranged around the mountainside by the port. I love a harbour town that comes down the mountainside to meet you.

We got off the ship with the help of a sweet young dude with blonde streaks in his hair who was coming to visit his mate and maybe go see the dragons.

The dragons!

We had made it to dragon country…