Okay, Back to Flores (I'm Way Behind)

I shouldn't get so far behind on the blogging...it makes me get a little hazy on some of the details.

When we last left off in Flores, we had nice day in Bajawa including tribal villages, hot springs, and nearly ruining someone's wedding day. It is worth noting, however, that the guesthouse we spent two nights in there was "rustic" with a smell that can only be described as raw sewage periodically emanating from our bathroom. And no, that was not caused by my eating too much spicy food. Anyway, we tolerated it. Which was a must at nearly every guesthouse in Flores.

The following day we moved on to Moni, the last stop on our Flores tour. It was a long drive, and along the way we stopped in the port town of Ende to run some errands (failing to find working internet) and eat lunch.

Unfortunately, lunch = bad. No, really. Bad in the 'food poisoning' kind of way, not in the 'doesn't taste great' kind of way. Alison and Laurent ate shrimp that we later assumed must have been frozen and re-frozen a dozen times (there were power outages every day). It turned on Alison first--we didn't even make it to Moni before we were stopping the car a couple of times so she could, um, more closely examine the flora & fauna.

Although I had eaten a couple of pieces, I thankfully survived the incident without trauma, allowing me to nurse Alison for the next day or so. We planned two days in Moni, which worked out in our favor, since there was only about one day's worth of stuff to see there and both Alison and Laurent ended up laid up for a full day (with another day of sightseeing and shaky recovery). Our guesthouse was really cheap, and also new, and also had mosquito nets, which is like a trifecta, but unfortunately there was another wedding happening just across the street from our place and it was SUPER loud. That raged til after midnight, then there were roosters at 3am. Then a dog freaking out. Then the mosque's call to prayer at 4am. Not peaceful by any means but we made it through the first night and after that it wasn't so bad.

Moni is a very small mountain village with great views (yawn) and nothing to do. It was also coldish and rainy almost the entire time. I found it relaxing and it really was a good place for recovery. The main reason to stop there is to see Mt. Kelimutu, billed in the Lonely Planet as 'without a doubt the most impressive sight in [the surrounding island group]'. Mt. Kelimutu has three crater lakes, which from time to time actually change color for some reason no one is entirely sure of. We made the trip for sunrise (no more sunrises, please) and were lucky--we had good views of the crater lakes. It was very beautiful, and worth the trip. A picture of two of the lakes is in a previous post. One is sort of turquoise blue, the other brown.

We spent the rest of the time in Moni hiking about and visiting a small village that had a neat traditional ceremony house. Other than that, there wasn't much to do, so we drank tea and sat in a restaurant and played 'Old Maid' and poker with the family for hours.

After two days we drove to Maumere, home of the nearest airport, to depart for the next leg of our trip (Java). We had to say sad goodbyes to the family, who were headed for Sulawesi (the land of the buffalo sacrifice). Flores was truly fantasic and we have lots of great memories. But we were also really glad to be headed to a place with better food and accommodation...

Next up: Yogyakarta sucks, then sort of almost wins us over.