Easter at the islands

Happy Easter everyone ! Easter is a very big deal here as Flores is a predominantly Roman Catholic island and Larantuka, at the eastern end of the island, is especially famous for its Holy Week and Easter weekend celebrations. This year is the 500th anniversary of the Portuguese arrivals here and so was a specially significant celebration and many people from Maumere and all over Flores made their way there for the weekend.

I, on the other hand, went in the opposite direction. West of Maumere along the north coast of Flores are the towns of Mbay and Riung. Mbay is home to two volunteers - Mikal from Ohio and Brenda from the Philipines. They were interested in travelling to Riung (a little further west than Mbay) and visiting the 17 Islands National Park so I decided to join them.

The trip from Maumere to Mbay is an eight to hour nine hour bus journey along the most appalling road imaginable. As with most Asian countries, public transport here is pretty basic and buses are usually massively overloaded.

 

As you can see, my bus was approved to carry 23 passengers, which  seems sensible as there were 23 seats. However, when the bus arrived at the pickup point all the seats were already full. However, that's never an obstacle so we all just piled in and set off with two or three to a seat, a few hanging out of the doors and about eight on the roof. Fifty four people in all, one goat, a number of chickens and too many sacks of rice to count...

After eight hours of this plunging up and down hills on mostly unsurfaced roads (with just one 30 minute stop) I made it to Mbay and met with Brenda and Mikal. The next day we travelled on to Riung on a motorbike (borrowed from the brother-in-law of a Maumere friend I met on the bus !) and found a small rather rundown hotel with a very friendly owner called Simeon.

Simeon arranged a boat for us for the following day and came us with on our trip to the islands. We left the harbour at about 8am and returned at about 4pm.We visited a few islands, one of which is home to the most enormous bat population I have ever seen.

   

 

Later we visited our own private desert island for a delicious lunch cooked on the beach by Simeon and stopped at about four separate locations for some great snorkelling.

 

Leo, our captain, cleaning the fish for lunch

Mikal & Brenda on our desert island

A house near the harbour at Riung

On Sunday we were invited to have lunch at the home of a friend (the guy who lent me his brother-in-law's motorbike) near Mbay. A very relaxing afternoon spent sitting under a mango tree chatting and being watched by lots of big eyes...

Then, on Monday morning it was back to the bus terminal for a 7am departure for Maumere, arriving home exactly nine hours later. Worth every minute of it....