The news was discouraging when we landed on Rinca Island Tuesday afternoon. No one had spotted any Komodo dragons that entire day — nor the day before. I tried to resign myself to the same fate. When you seek rare animals in the wild, it’s not like buying a movie ticket. You’re not guaranteed a show. But we lucked out.
Almost immediately after we paid for our admission to Komodo National Park, the friendly park ranger to whom we were assigned urged us to run — toward a dragon that had just ambled into the entry complex from the nearby forest. She was a female maybe 7 years old, he estimated, and thus maybe only half the size of a full-grown male. Still, no one who saw her could doubt she and her kind are the biggest lizards in the world. If they were any bigger, you’d be looking at a dinosaur.
As lethal as her claws appeared to be, they’re not her main weapon. Each Komodo dragon’s jaw holds 60 teeth, and sandwiched among them are glands loaded with toxic venom. A single bite won’t instantly kill a deer or buffalo (or human), but the venom promotes bleeding and dreadful infection to which victims succumb after a few days or even hours. Adding to their charm, the dragons are cannibals, eating each other and even their unwary young. Smarter youngsters hide in trees for several years to avoid being munched.
I’d rank them as the least lovable of the world’s big flashy animals. Nonetheless Steve and I had a blast on our two brief forays into their world. That first afternoon, our ranger, Masakao, led us on a hike into a tangled forest that’s also home to spitting cobras and other venomous snakes. The plant life looked different from what we’d seen in the forests in Bali and Sumatra. That’s because when we had flown east from Bali, we crossed the Wallace Line. Eons ago, the continents of Asia and Australia had broken apart along that conceptual demarcation, and so today the plant and animals on either side of it have different evolutionary origins.
We moved down the dirt path and soon approached a small abandoned building that once housed a power generator. Masakao motioned for us to stop while, armed with a long forked stick, he crept up to the doorway and peered in.
Another score! The ranger asked for Steve’s phone and recorded the temporary occupant: a male whose big belly testified to recent consumption of a meaty feast. Now he was digesting in the cool comfort of the man-made shelter.
In the course of our ramble, we came across another big male. That one even gave us a look at his fearsome choppers…
…before crossing the trail and moving into the underbrush, long tongue flicking.
I felt jubilant as we returned to our quarters for the night, a wooden ship of eccentric design that’s common in these waters. To see Komodo dragons you need some kind of a boat. The famous reptiles live almost exclusively on five islands off Flores (a bigger island originally colonized by Portuguese and thus home today to one of Indonesia’s only significant Catholic populations.) You can take a speedboat from Flores out for a frantic, grueling day of dragon-hunting, but most visitors opt for a one- to three-night cruise. Steve’s and mine was a private one, and included the services of a conscientious guide named Robert and four young men who ran the ship and cooked.
It was far from fancy. Here was the single toilet/shower stall shared by the 7 of us:
…and the galley where the cook whipped up meals like these:
This lunch included rice (in the covered dish), tofu sautéed in a soy sauce, stewed cabbage and carrots, and squid prepared two ways.
This was breakfast the second morning.
If basic, the food was edible, and it didn’t make us sick. Our cramped cabin also had an AC unit that cut the muggy heat. I kept reminding myself that the sojourn was less grubby than tent-camping in the tropics. Slightly.
The second morning, Robert, Steve, and I left the ship before dawn to join the stream of visitors climbing the 815 steps up tiny Padar Island.
The view from near the top, taking in three different-colored beaches (black, white, and pink) is so famous it’s on Indonesia’s 50,000-rupiah bank note. Indonesian tour groups pressed for time will often choose to visit it and skip the Komodo dragons, according to Robert.
But who would choose a landscape selfie over what we saw later that morning? I can’t imagine.
Once again, luck was with us. We motored to Komodo Island, and on the beach we immediately found a young dragon, risking its life to come down from its tree and hunt for breakfast.
Not far from the juvenile, an alert-looking adult female was identifiable by her head and tail, shorter than than what males are equipped with.
This time our park ranger, Dula, took my iPhone and shot the wonderful video footage I will try to incorporate here. I hope it’s viewable on the blog; part terrifying, part comic, it’s documentary evidence of one of the most unforgettable strolls of my life.
We encountered several more of the dragons during our visit. Then it was time to board the boat again and motor on; reptiles weren’t the only animals on our itinerary. The turquoise waters that surround the dragons’ islands conceal choral reefs and a wondrous community of aquatic life.
We didn’t succeed at seeing all of it. The wind blew hard for a few hours on our final morning, whipping up white caps that drove the local manta rays and sea turtles to deeper water. But we did manage to snorkel three times in calm water, and each outing delighted me. The sea was clear and warm, and I felt as close as I will ever get to flight, gliding effortlessly over the landscape of coral and anemones and rocks, in the company of neon-colored fish, many dressed up in astonishing patterns. At times we sailed by rivers of fish; into clouds of them. Once I started to laugh out loud at the concentrated beauty but was quickly reminded that’s not a great idea when you’re breathing through a snorkel.
Our first night on the boat we made one other wildlife stop that caused me exclaim with awe. It was close to sunset when we anchored on the eastern side of a long flat island composed almost exclusively of mangroves.
We watched the molten tangerine sliver of sun shrink to a dot and disappear and the color begins to drain from the sky. Several long moments passed, but enough of a glow still remained that I could make out the strange thing that began to occur — a stream of tiny black objects rising out of the mangroves like cinders flowing up from a campfire and dispersing.
The stream thickened and grew; that’s when I cried out. These were fruit bats, a vast horde of them, ranging out by the millions to hunt insects in the night.
People sometimes call them flying foxes, but as they passed overhead their iconic shape was unmistakable, flapping, gliding, graceful.
More and still more bats continued to pulse out of the mangroves; they reminded me of the grand finale of a fireworks display, not as bright or colorful as the tropical fish or fireworks, but as magnificent in their ability to dominate the space with their movement. I know some folks find bats terrifying. In that they’re like the Komodo dragons, who certainly got my adrenaline flowing. Both are creatures almost mythic in their ability to inspire fear. But in the right circumstances, the sight of them can fill me with awe and happiness.
For our week in Bali, I used Guest Points we’ve acquired on 
The bathroom attached to our bedroom also was open to the elements. That’s the shower next to the plants against the wall, with the sink inside the little gate. The toilet was behind me to my right.
Here’s the view from the living area of the building containing Steven and Christina’s bedroom.
This was one of the free photo opp sites.
To get in, we had to don proper Balinese garb, i.e sarongs (which we borrowed for free from the temple.)
So it cracked us up to see that for the equivalent of about $3.50, you could pay to have a park employee entice one of the monkeys onto your lap and photograph you.
We resisted, but managed to capture a few images of the adorable baby macaques without making their moms mad (as the signs claimed could happen.)
Despite being tethered to the villa, we packed in a lot throughout the rest of our stay. Most fun was the morning we spent with Chef Mudana, who offers popular classes in Indonesian and Balinese cooking. We met him and our only fellow student (a network security expert named Sanjay from Sydney) last Saturday morning at the Jimbaran fish market, a wonderfully chaotic, stinky warren of fishermen unloading their wares and vendors selling the staggering variety of protein from the sea.
No doubt about the freshness of this stuff. We watched it coming off the boats.
Some of it looked too beautiful to eat. 
Mudana purchased a beautiful piece of mahi-mahi, and we made a quick run through the adjoining produce market to pick up what we needed for the class.
Then we drove to his base in the community of Sanur, a combination of family home, restaurant, and the classroom in which Mudana teaches foreigners how to cook like a Balinese. Here’s the street front:
And the room where we had our class.
…into a delicious seven-course meal. I plan to try to do this at home in San Diego.
One small patch of rice field still meets up with their property, but in just the last two years a stunning amount of development has gobbled up the rest of their bucolic surroundings. This has occurred despite the lack of such basic infrastructure as sidewalks and water services.
Sometimes I’m thrilled to find the footprint of American culture far from home. Sometimes I love when it isn’t where I’d expect it. We’ve already experienced both in Bali.
and a driver in a clean, air-conditioned vehicle materializes, usually within five minutes. We never have to worry about finding a taxi, a constant source of stress in the bad old days. The rides typically cost $2-$3 for a 15-minute trip; maybe $10 for one that lasts an hour or more.
We paid about $8.50 each for all-day tickets, then spent the next four hours exploring what turned out to be more weirdly, wackily different from the Anaheim and Orlando institutions than even Walt could have imagined. What we figured out by the end of our stay is that you go to GWK for two main reasons.
…and ate a basic lunch on a pleasant terrace overlooking the city. We were very excited about catching a 35-minute film that screened every hour in a little movie theater; surely it would fill in some of the blanks in our understanding of Bali and its history, I thought. But the film instead was an animated drama that depicted how Arjuna came to be Vishnu’s airborne chauffeur. 
The drama centered around young Garuda’s having to free his mom who was tricked into being enslaved by the evil witch, Kadru. It was cute and fun but about as educational as a Saturday morning cartoon.
Why were THEY here? What were they? Our 2021 edition of Lonely Planet Indonesia, incredibly, didn’t even mention the GWK cultural park. In the first-floor lobby that underlies the gigantic statue of Vishnu riding on Arjuna, we found some historical photos that hinted at why. The center apparently was only inaugurated in the fall of 2018, and we imagine the guidebook went to press before that. After our visit, we found a bit more information on Wikipedia, which explained that the park began as a government project, then construction shut down when the Asian financial crisis hit in the late 90s. A Balinese real-estate developer finally stepped in to take over the project and finish it. But nowhere in the park or online could we find an explanation for those monoliths. (Our theory is that the land originally was a rock quarry, and the monoliths were remnants of the original stone. But we don’t know if that’s right.)
by reporting on train travel in the UK and Europe — time tables for the major routes, how the system worked in each country, how to buy tickets, and so on. Pretty soon you had expanded to cover the whole world (as far as I can tell). Thanks to you, I’ve been able to plan train trips that took Steve and me from Singapore up the Malay peninsula (2016); from 
Its comfortable reclining seats, clean toilets, and functioning power made that ride a pleasure. I knew that to continue on from Surabaya to Ketapang on Java’s eastern tip our only option was an “Ekonomi-class” line but those trains were “perfectly safe and comfortable,” you assured us readers.
The bench seats on the one we took were plain, and it was all but impossible to avoid playing kneesies with the plump young woman who faced me for the first four and a half hours of the ride. But any train that posts a photo of its conductor has to make you feel you’re in competent hands.
We left Surabaya just three seconds after 5:30 a.m. and pulled into Ketapang six hours and 59 minutes later — a minute ahead of schedule.
In 1945 it also was the setting for a key event in the birth of Indonesia as an independent country. So when you declared, “Even if you’re on a budget, splurge here,” I complied. What a bargain splurge it turned out to be: $89 a day for a lovely suite in a setting that enticed us to abandon our normal hyper-driven sightseeing and spend a whole day chilling out.
I feel bad about shortchanging the magnificent temples we visited Friday; I mentioned them so briefly in my last post. Steve says the one at Borobudur was the most impressive religious structure he has seen anywhere. I’m not sure I’d go that far, but I’d put it at least in the top five. To make up, here are a few postcards from the day.
Yogyakarta is the cultural and religious heart of Indonesia, the ancient power base from which Javanese overlords long dominated much of the archipelago. Rich temple complexes and brooding volcanoes surround the city, and a sultan still lives behind palace walls fronted by sacred banyan trees. We couldn’t miss all that, so I built a two-and-a-half-day visit to Yogya into our Indonesian itinerary.
We ordered two, watched the uniformed Indonesian teenage checker warm them in her countertop microwave. Back in the room we wolfed them down with some chips — the lowest culinary point to which we’ve sunk in years.
The stage was arranged in such a way that you could watch the shadowy action on one side of the screen…
I’m not sure we’ll see another such show while we’re here, so I was grateful for this glimpse of Indonesia’s iconic art form.
Monday night over satay chicken and fried tofu and a bottle of Bintang beer, Steve and I talked about the orangutans of San Diego. The zoo has a big colony of them, located not far from the entrance plaza. Over the years I’ve probably passed their enclosure dozens of times; I know what they look like. But I had only the vaguest notion of where they came from. Now that I’ve been there, I can tell you: orangutans in the wild are much more beautiful than I could imagine; of all the great apes, they look the most like movie stars.
We crossed one of the many bridges spanning the Sungai Bohorok River,and Dani explained how the infamous fruit of the durian tree (wildly popular throughout Asia) is grown and marketed.
The forest smelled delicious and it thrummed with a symphony of percussive insects. 
By the time we passed through the gate, we were climbing in earnest.Within minutes Dani pointed to some orangutan nests high overhead, empty at the moment but recently occupied.
Soon we came upon a small knot of people murmuring with excitement at the proximity of two bright orange forms moving through the nearby trees.
We finally broke away and descended in earnest around 2 pm, my knees by then grievously annoyed by what I’d put them through.
We rode for a bit, stopped and strolled, took in the spectacularly fertile landscape around us. 
Dani pointed out the rows of sprightly peanut plants growing along the edge of the rice fields. He explained how to tell when the rice was ready for harvesting — only three months after the seedlings are stuck in the flooded fields. Besides rice, so many things grow in this rich volcanic soil you could probably spend a week taking it all in. We saw fields of cassava…
When he judged it to be just right, he poured the thick goo into the molds…
and it soon solidified into a puck of concentrated fruity sweetness.
I found it delicious, not as crunchy as the brown cane sugar in my kitchen at home, but containing more complex layers of flavor.
I did not come to Indonesia to do road trips. But now that I’ve done half of one, I can say at least they’re educational. If like Dorothy, you want visceral assurance you are NOT in Kansas, a drive through parts of Sumatra delivers. Our experience Sunday afternoon also solved a mystery for me, namely I had been unable to imagine how it could take four hours to go 65 miles in a nicely maintained Toyota SUV. Now I know.
When you’re all barreling over two narrow lanes, driving becomes vastly more freestyle than anything you ever see in the US or Europe, People thread their way up the wrong side of the road. Many folks favor straddling the faded middle divider line, probably to enhance their readiness for passing. Not passing is NOT an option. You simply must get around all the barely motorized vehicles carrying improbable loads.
All this chaos feels remarkably dangerous, and we saw direct confirmation that, yes, it is. We passed the large truck whose crash had delayed Hari. Someone had somehow got it upright again, but it was still stuck by the side of the road. Further along, we whizzed by a demolished motorbike whose driver was still struggling to get up from under it.
My head swiveled, too, at all the broad rivers we crossed, most the color of coffee with cream.
Around 5:35 the light was starting to dim and I cringed at the thought of it vanishing altogether as we rattled along for another 75 minutes. But then Hari piped up that we were almost at our destination! Indeed we bounced over dirt road for only a few minutes, entered a jungly stretch of road, and then stopped at a sign for the lodge next to a dirt path leading into a thicket of green. The sun still hadn’t set when we greeted the owner.
That would be Indonesia, land of thousands upon thousands of islands — 14,000? 17,000? I’m not sure anyone knows. Also home to more humans than only three other countries (India, China, and the USA.)
At home and abroad 