Crash

The view from our 'Hotel Crazy Guy' It's amazing at all times of the day, but especially at Sunset. Labuanbajo, Flores.

I am on the Indonesian island of Flores.

Everyone stares at me, no matter where I go.

There is a crazy (or possibly just retarded) 21 year old handcuffed to a bed in the house next to our hotel who makes 'da-da-da-da-da-da-da-da' noises all day and into the night continuously.

It's very hard to arrange transportation and I never seem to know what is going on.

We all spent a few days viewing Komodo dragons and snorkeling in some of the most wonderful waters I have seen. We took leave of Lauren, Zubeyir and Lindsay who were bound for Bali and thought we would hire a car to get across the island. With five of us, it seemed like a reasonable proposition.

Of course, I have noticed a negative correlation with reasonable propositions and occurrence of the phrase 'not possible' wherever I go in the world. And this is a not possible part of the world.

Me and my sister with some pretty lazy Komodo Dragons. Not that I am being judgmental...

We bargained for a car and driver for the next week. One deal came together then fell apart. One driver demanded all $200 for the week upfront. No Way. Another man kept injecting himself into every attempted transaction until my sister sent him away because when he was around, everything seemed worse. Finally we struck a deal with a driver, Hermans to take us and we were off.

Flores, like much of Indonesia is volcanic- really recently volcanic in fact. Time has not had the chance to flatten out the youthful exuberance of a geologically active island. Roads are narrow, steep and winding all at once. Our diminutive driver could not see over the irresponsibly placed strip of tinting that covered the bottom third of the windshield and thus we had many hair raising brushes with the mountain as night fell and visibility reduced to the domain of pathetic. At this point, you might expect that I tell you we had an accident. I was expecting that myself, but no, it was not to be until later.

Creepy shrine-like thing of Komodo Dragon leftovers. (Deer and Monkey). Rinca Island.

Instead, we got to our hotel safely and checked in for the night. It was not until the next afternoon, just minutes after lunch that the course of events would change for the real worse.

It is amazing to take a moment- an instant in time- and freeze it in your mind, rewinding it and seeing just how easily things could have been different. It's so simple that we could have stopped to buy a soda at a store, or left behind something at a stop and gone back for it. Or even paying the bill with exact change and getting on the road again an half minute earlier. Any one of these, or an one of an infinite number of other changes to time would have prevented us from colliding with a motorbike carrying two Indonesian men and a sack of rice. If almost anything had been different, I would not have looked down at my ipod and felt the crush of metal and plastic only an instant later. If I had just gone to the bathroom, we would not have loaded the delirious man with a huge patch flesh hanging from his leg into our car to take him back to the clinic 2 km away.

It was not our driver's fault. He was on the correct side of the road, taking the left turn around the corner slowly. It was just pure bad luck that the guy on the motor scooter hit us, but it really changed lives. We got the two damaged men to the clinic and the doctor on call sewed the enormous wound up. Of course, no effort was taken to repair what must have been serious damage to the muscles and ligaments that will ultimately cripple the man- there just aren't resources for that or the expertise on this island.

At the clinic, people started to gather. We are in a town where there is not much to do, so all the people doing all that nothing gravitated to the clinic grounds. At first it was 10, then 20, then 30 then it was 50 or 60 people all huddled around us staring.

Just staring.

It was creepy in a way that I don't think I can explain to someone who has not seen it. We moved to our scratched hired car to retrieve our bags. They followed us, silently, without expression. We decided it would be best to get out of town. We left on the next bus that came through town and were glad to be rid of the whole mess.

Chapter 2.

One of the deal-clinchers for my sister in deciding to come to Indonesia as opposed to somewhere else was a particularly fabulous volcano with three lakes at the summit, each a different color. So it was to Kelimutu that we continued on towards.

I get to play dress up for reasons that are not clear to me with a hawker at the summit of Kelimutu just after sunrise.

Sorry if the rest of the story is not so dramatic. We ended up at the lovely town of Moni and went to the top of a truly magnificent volcano at 4:30 in the morning to catch yet another mountaintop sunrise.

One of the lakes of Kelimutu. Just beyond this lake is a darker green one. The pH is an incredible .37 (extremely acidic). In case that doesn't mean anything to you, this lake is probably about like condensed battery acid. It would kill anyone who got in it.