Going from Bali to Flores is quite something, a sort of exercise in tourism extremes. Although only an hour’s flight apart, the former receives 1.4m tourists a year, while the latter gets less than 10,000. In Bali, top-end hotels cost $500 plus, while in Flores, you’re hard pressed to spend more than $10. And while I’d love to wax lyrical about the rustic charm of Flores’s accommodation, it pretty much is a case of you get what you pay for. The hotel in Bali probably is 50 times better.
But no matter: you don’t come to these places to hang around five-star hotels. And Flores is remarkably beautiful: it sports one of the most densely volcanic landscapes in the world. Everywhere you look perfect cones soar jungle-clad into the clouds and knife-edge cliffs cloaked in nature’s most unnaturally vivid green plunge straight into a turquoise sea. In fact, the landscape probably looks a little like Hawaii did before it was sympathetically covered in high-rise hotels and strip malls.
The islands themselves are a surprise too. Visitors come to Indonesia expecting to see people who look stereotypically south-east Asian, but the country has any number of ethnic groups. The Flores folk are mostly a mix between the Malay west of the country and the Melanesian east, where people can be almost black; you also get some faces with a Portuguese cast. Another hangover from European contact is that in predominantly Muslim Indonesia the island is overwhelmingly Roman Catholic – although, as we soon learnt, this is not always quite what it seems.
There is little reason to linger in Ende, the island’s main port so we hired a car and driver and motored up an attractive jungly gorge of waterfalls to the little village of Moni, the nearest town to Kelimutu, Flores’s best- known attraction. The rightly celebrated Kelimutu is a triple-coned volcano and in each huge caldera is a lake that has been stained by minerals. The colours change frequently: at the time of our visit they were chocolate, turquoise and black though last year the brown lake was a delightfully camp candyfloss pink.
As we’d arrived late, we checked in and hunkered down in our $7-a-night accommodation, waking at four the following morning to climb the mountain. There really is a good reason to get up this early. The second it starts to warm up, clouds are drawn up mountains and rush towards the summit. So to see anything worthwhile you have to get there while it’s still chilly. Wise words: shivering atop Kelimutu, warmed only by sugary coffee, we watched dawn break and realised the clouds had beaten us to it.
I had visions of a sort of Groundhog Day with a daily 4am scrabble up a volcano but then the sun put in a bit of effort and torched the fog off this weird and wonderful landscape. Kelimutu’s Vulcan triptych really is a marvellous sight, especially the shocking turquoise lake which is Dali-esque, like a crater filled with paint. The black lake is positively sepulchral – as well it should be, for local legend says this is where the souls of the dead reside – while the brown one is a 1km-wide cup of espresso. The more foolhardy in our group wandered along the edge, ignoring the guide’s admonishments that quite a few people have fallen several hundred metres into the highly acidic blue lake, from where, presumably, it is a short hop for their souls to the black lake.
Moni is a one-volcano village, so after a lunch among beautiful rice paddies we headed back down to the coast along the rather grandly named Trans Flores Highway; I presume it is called this because Trans Flores Cart Track doesn’t convey the right image. En route, we caught one of Flores’s second-string tourist attractions, the greenstone beach at Nangaroro.
I always have something of a soft spot for these minor attractions – they try that little bit harder. But with so few tourists, this was exactly what it purported to be: a beach with a lot of green stones. It does support a rather interesting little industry, bagging up the greenstones and sending them to Japan for use in zen gardening, but Dr Johnson’s diktat applies: it’s worth seeing, but not worth going to see.
After a swim, we headed up into the highlands and the rain. Distances in Flores are short but this is as the crow flies. The island’s unrelenting vulcanism means that the quickest way between two points usually involves skirting eight or nine mountains and crossing a couple of ravines. Plus the weather was incredible. It made the average downpour anywhere else look like drizzle. But we eventually made it up to the highland town of Bijawa, capital of the Ngada region.
In a country where towns often tend to scruffiness, Bajawa is a sweet little exception. It’s the Indonesian equivalent of a garden city, with trim hedges, verdant verges and flowers everywhere, surrounded by the ubiquitous and magnificent volcanoes. But Bajawa is more than just easy on the eye, it is also the heart of the fascinating Ngada culture.
Indeed, much of Indonesia is an anthropologist’s delight. Almost everywhere in the backwoods of this vast, fragmented country are people who had little contact with the outside world until the mid 20th century and have a far stronger sense of identity than many of the tourist cultural pantomimes found in south-east Asia.
We hired a guide, Theodore, who took us to his village with its uphill-downhill class system, megalithic graves and ngadhu, which are totemic pairs of parasols and small thatched houses, symbolising the continual presence of ancestor spirits. In the square, we were told buffalo and chicken were still sacrificed; rumour has it not so very long ago these rites weren’t limited to animals.
What was most interesting for me though was how all this dovetailed with the gold cross Theo wore around his neck. Sure, these nominal Catholics worshipped the same God as the Pope, but He was merely one of any number of deities they believed in. To be fair, I think He’s fairly well up the hierarchy but the attitude seemed to be that if you worship half a dozen (mainly animist) gods, then, well, one more wouldn’t hurt. As Theo explained, “We do believe in God, but this way is different – you have to believe your ancestors are behind you.” I found myself wondering what the Vatican would have made of these far-flung members of its flock.
Still pondering these theological niceties, we drove round another dozen or so volcanoes to the local hot springs. These were about as far from a luxury spa as you can imagine, but they had a certain rustic charm and there was no doubting their hydraulic vigour: sitting directly over one of the vents would probably have given you a hot-water enema.
The following day, we switched back to pyrotechnic tourism and went to see Wawo Muda, Indonesia’s newest volcano, DOB 2001. This was essentially a pleasant walk through the verdant highlands of Flores, all undulating green ridges, surrounded by the usual awesome peaks. But the object of our walk clearly wasn’t one of them: where, I wondered, was the Volcano Jr?
And then we saw it. A huge gash in the landscape, looking like an open-cast mine, but with a sulphurous smell. Hundreds of metres below, at the bottom, were blasted pine trees, raw soil and a couple of little lakes stained a sickly reddish brown by minerals. Theo told us the locals were bruiting these muddy puddles about as Kelimutu II; having seen the original, I can tell you they are having a laugh.
According to the gaggle of vulcanologists who des-cended on the area shortly after Wawo Mudu’s highly dramatic conversion from a cow pasture to a 500 metre hole in the ground, it is unlikely that this particular event will ever explode again. However, Theo said, a nearby ridge is starting to bulge and behave in a worryingly restive (seismically speaking) manner. He shrugged: this, of course, is the downside of living in such a fabulous landscape: you never know when your pretty green field is going to turn into a stygian pit leading straight down to the depths of hell.
