Big Trip Day 156: The World's Most Beautiful Road Trip
Hey friends,
Last you heard from us, we were roaming the streets of Hoi An in search of the perfect suit. Well, you’ll be pleased to know that after seven weeks floating across the ocean, my three suits have made it to Salt Lake City, where they will collect dust for the next 6 months.
Dory and I, on the other hand, simply came right back to Indonesia, where we met up with our very first visitors, Joanne and Steve a.k.a. Dory’s parents a.k.a. my future in-laws! They planned to visit us for three weeks, which I’ve heard is the recommended amount of time to spend with your in-laws, continuously, with no breaks, on a remote island. But seriously, I was excited for this leg of the trip because I knew that Joanne and Steve are seasoned travelers with a keen eye for identifying experiences that have the right balance of being both remarkable and authentic... but not too authentic.
Our first stop was Yogyakarta (pronounce the y’s like j’s — “Joeg-ja-karta”) which is a bustling city located East of Jakarta on the Island of Java. Leading up to the trip, Joanne had spoken with her old friend and colleague Marilyn, who had worked for several years with an Indonesian man named Lio. Joanne was put in touch with Lio, who now lives in Yogyakarta, or “Yogya” as it’s more often called, and he generously offered to show us around his city. For the better part of two days, we drove around with Lio, getting a local tour of the city highlights, which included street markets, the Borobudur Temple, a specialty coffee shop with a 100 year-old loom, and a theatrical performance based on the Hindu epic, Ramayana.
Yogya honestly wasn’t our favorite place, but we appreciated the opportunity to learn about this part of Indonesia from a local, or “loc dog” as I prefer to say. For instance, a fun fact we learned is that Yogyakarta has a special exception to the democratic structure: Yogya continues to have an appointed King, following the traditional patriarchy. The King is also automatically appointed as the local governor and carries out his duties accordingly. When he is participating in an official ceremony, he wears traditional King’s garments, but when he is carrying out his duties as governor, he just wears regular business clothes… wowee! That’s pretty neat!!
From Yogya, we took a flight to Labuan Bajo on the island of Flores. By sheer coincidence, it was discovered just a couple weeks beforehand that Joanne’s sister Barbara and her husband were going to be on a trip that stopped in Labuan Bajo at the same time as us! Dory and I last saw Barbara and Steve on the exact night we left for the first leg of Big Trip — in fact, they drove us to the airport so we could catch our flight to Singapore — so it was pretty amazing to see them again.
So on our first night in Labuan Bajo, all six of us went out to dinner at a restaurant at the end of the pier that had the most stunning view of the surrounding archipelago complemented by a breathtaking sunset. I do recommend hanging out with your in-laws in this exact setting; it’s impossible not to enjoy yourself.
Our first official activity on Flores was to go scuba diving/snorkeling! We booked a trip on a budget liveaboard diving boat called Mimic, named after a type of octopus. The part about the excursion that was “budget” was that we all slept on the deck in the open air, rather than having private sleeping quarters, but we all thought the setup was actually quite nice.
In addition to the four of us, two other divers joined us. Their names were Courtney and Katie, but were better known as Split and Sobo, which are the trail names they picked up while hiking the Appalachian Trail. Split and Sobo were seriously committed adventure buddies who had just finished cycling from the north to the south tip of New Zealand. They were also hopeless romantics, who believed they were destined to be single forever, but they insisted that Dory’s parents, and Dory and I, share our respective love stories in excruciating detail. We were happy to oblige!
We were also happy to find that the crew members on the boat were all Indonesian, which was a big contrast from our diving experience in Thailand. The crew was incredibly knowledgeable, professional, and full of jokes. The leader named Dolin showed us the underwater symbol for “sting ray” (a closed fist with the middle finger pointed sideways), which happens to be quite similar to the symbol for “stop fucking around!”. Another crew member named Is, when asked if he ever lost any divers, answered, “yes, last week we lost one and he died,” only cracking a smile after everyone started panicking.
We were all there to do one simple thing: observe fish! And other sea life, if it presented itself. We split up into three small groups and dove three times a day, so with meal breaks, the days were surprisingly full. Each time we dove, it was in a different spot that was strategically chosen to see specific sea life. The visibility and the biodiversity were absolutely astounding! This area was promoted as one of the best in the world, and it absolutely held up to its reputation.
At a dive site called Manta Alley, we cruised around underwater manta ray “cleaning stations,” which were little islands of coral dispersed across the expansive sandy bottom. We were patiently on the lookout for some charismatic megafauna, when all of a sudden, we saw an enormous Oceanic Manta Ray, 15 feet across, swooping down towards us like a pterodactyl, and then coming to a standstill just 10 feet away, where it welcomed the surrounding fish to clean its underside. After about a minute, it swam off, did a u-turn, and swooped around again, this time hovering right over our heads. We were told that bubbles scared mantas, so we did our best not to breathe out. After another 15 seconds, eventually somebody exhaled and the bubbles spooked the manta, causing it to jolt up and take flight off into the deep blue abyss. Mantas are harmless to humans, but with its tail the size of a javelin and enormous mouth, I absolutely feared for my life. That was truly a peak experience.
Another dive site called Shotgun, was located in an underwater slot canyon. We quickly learned how this site earned its name. Once you reach the entrance to the underwater canyon, the current sucks you in and launches you forward at an alarming rate, zipping you past more sea life than you can comprehend. Towards the exit of the canyon, you must kick your fins as hard as you can to exit out of the current before it pulls you out to sea. Like a rollercoaster, it was over-stimulating but quite a thrill.
On our last day, we docked the boat at Komodo Island to see some Komodo Dragons. To be honest, after observing vibrant and energetic sea life for three days, these big lazy lizards were less than thrilling. However, we were told that during mating season, the males are often engaging in battles to the death, which I would absolutely come back to see.
The dive boat dropped us back in town, and Steve, Joanne, Dory and I had one night to relax and reorganize before beginning a mega cross-Flores road trip. We hired a driver named Ignas to transport us 400 miles eastward over the course of 7 days. Ignas was perhaps the best driver in the world, strategically overtaking slow cars on the two lane highway, while never going too fast so nobody got carsick on the twisty “mie goreng roads” — mie goreng is the local version of instant ramen noodle, so suitably bendy. Ignas used to drive the “fish car,” which is a truck that transports fish along the exact route we were taking during the road trip. He said he used to drive the whole thing in one day and it would take 16 hours each way, so he much preferred driving tourists around. Made sense to me.
We soon realized that this had to be the most beautiful roadtrip in the world. On our journey from Labuan Bajo to the beach town of Maumere, our eventual end point, we saw dozens of sites and places to stay, and passed viewpoints with the most remarkable vistas you could imagine. Given that Steve is a photographer, we would frequently ask Ignas to pull over to take a snapshot of a gorgeous terraced rice field surrounded by mountains with rivers running through the valley, and then five minutes further down the road, we’d spot an EVEN MORE beautifully framed rice field centered between mountains with a waterfall behind it! You could seriously publish a coffee table book showing the most beautiful rice fields in Flores and it would sell millions of copies.
With all the stopping for photos, it gave the locals plenty of chances to cheerfully shout “hey mister!!!” at us, which they all somehow collectively understood to be the proper way to greet westerners of any gender. We enjoyed it and felt a little bit like celebrities.
The next stop was to see the cave where the most recent discovery of a previously unknown human species took place. This species, named Homo floresiensis a.k.a. the Hobbits, were quite small, standing at less than 4 feet tall.
Throughout our journey through the mountains and along the coast, we made an effort to swim in a body of water once a day to break up the driving. We stopped at a waterfall you could swim behind, and a swimming hole you could jump into, and a natural hot spring in the middle of a rice field. Along the coast we took a pit stop at a restaurant that looked over Blue Stone Beach, where I got to do some unexpected body surfing.
We had to be strategic with where we wanted to stop for the night to ensure it was a nice town with available accommodation, and to make sure we were splitting up the drive into manageable chunks. One of the most memorable places where we stayed for two nights was a town called Moni. We found rooms at a quirky place called Rago’s that was run by 3 incredibly young dudes who were extremely hospitable and very much into the “Rasta” vibes. One of the reviews for the place said “it could use a woman’s touch,” and that was certainly true. You could see that they had put some real effort into the design of the place, but they were missing the mark in a few ways.
For instance, our bathroom floor was covered in these little loose pebbles, which was cute and felt kind of nice on your feet. The problem was that the pebbles stuck to the bottom of your feet so we were constantly tracking in and scattering little rocks all over our bedroom floor. Joanne and Steve’s bathroom had better flooring, but had the notable omission of a sink. But overall, Ragos’ was great. It had a nice view overlooking the river, and the boys whipped up some surprisingly delicious meals for us.
The main reason we stopped in Moni was to see the 3 Color Lakes at Kelimutu National Park. There are three volcanoes, each with a different color lake in their respective craters, which have changed color over time. One of them had the most magnificent aqua color that looked like it would burn your hand off if you touched it. It was hard to believe that it was a naturally produced liquid from the earth.
Another notable place we stopped was Riung, which was the jumping off point for the 17 Islands National Park. From Riung, we took a boat to visit four of the 17 islands, where we did some snorkeling and walked along white sand beaches surrounded by turquoise water, feeling like we belonged in an ad for everyone’s ideal vacation. We also anchored the boat just off the coast of “Bat Island,” where we witnessed droves of flying foxes — huge fruit-eating bats that really do look like fuzzy foxes with wings — nesting upside down on the branches of the mangroves. The sheer quantity of bats was unbelievable.
On both nights in Riung, we had dinner at a restaurant called “Pato Resto” that had live music and was full of bule’s (westerners). On both nights, the local musician played a version of “No Woman No Cry,” substituting in his own lyrics: “and we would cook Nasi Goreng!, of which I’ll share with you”. That’s Indonesian fried rice -- we laughed the first night, and the second night we realized he does this routine every day, always with a smile! Tourism sure is silly.
Once we arrived in Maumere, we were happy to be done sitting in the car, and I’m sure Ignas was happy to be rid of us. We thanked Ignas and bid him farewell, and settled in for our last night on Flores. The next day, we had to catch a flight to Bali so that Dory’s parents could get one step closer to catching their long flight home, and so Dory and I could go surfboard shopping to prepare for the next leg of our trip.
There was, however, one more task that Dory and I wanted to try and get done. We needed to extend our visas, and we heard that it’s a three week process in Bali — and we did not want to be on Bali for that long! But someone back in Moni told us that you could extend your visa in a matter of hours at the immigration office in Maumere, so we thought we’d give it a try. We showed up to the visa office when they opened at 8am and told them we needed our visa renewed by 10:30am so that we could catch our flight at 12pm. The very nice woman who helped us said she would try but there was no guarantee, and it depended on how fast “the system” was working. We rushed through the paperwork, got a ride with another traveler to make the payment at the bank, came back and waited. At 11am, at more or less the exact minute we were ready to give up and forfeit the money we paid, the woman came out with our stamped renewed visas! She handed us our passports, and we rushed to the airport just in time to catch our flight. It was truly a heroic accomplishment within the realm of government bureaucracy, and saved us untold administrative inconvenience for the weeks to come.
We had a smooth flight getting to Bali, and we all settled into our Airbnb in Sanur, complete with a pool and a very friendly housekeeper who made the four of us a delicious breakfast every morning. We essentially chilled out for two days, enjoying all the culinary delights that the touristic area had to offer, until it was time for Joanne and Steve to head onwards to Singapore.
As our time together was coming to an end, I reflected on how special it was to spend so much time with Joanne and Steve. I’m grateful to have had a chance to really get to know them better, create some unforgettable memories, and share a proper adventure. Big thanks to the Trimniks for coming all this way to see us!!!
Our next stop as solo travelers once again was to go hunting for surfboards for the next leg of our trip: surfing in West Sumbawa. More on that soon, but it’s safe to say we are enjoying our surf idiot summer.
Love,
Justin & Dory
P.S. As a treat for reading this entire, very long newsletter, you get one more photo. Please don’t cancel us.
