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Riung and the 17 Islands

Wednesday, January 6th, 2010

flores-day-4-riung-043.jpg

A quick apology for being offline for a bit–it isn’t always easy to get connected enough for things like uploading photos in this part of the world. It’s not that we don’t have lots to post! Anyway, moving right along…

One of the best excursions of our whole time on Flores was a day trip  from the north coast fishing town of Riung to the “17 Islands Nature Reserve,” a group of idyllic, uninhabited, sand-beached islands surrounded by clear blue water…and absolutely NO people. Seriously, even though we were facing the Flores coastline, we didn’t even see so much as a single fishing boat all day (although I’m sure the fact that it was Dec 24th had something to do with that). It almost made the difficult journey there worth it to have this entire coastline and archipelago to ourselves for the day.

 Home Sweet Home (no, not ours) flores-day-4-riung-003.jpg flores-day-4-riung-010.jpg

As you’d expect, we spent he day snorkelling off the beach, eating fresh fish grilled over a coconut husk fire, and generally chilling out on th beach sipping cold Bintang we’d had the forethought to bring along.

lunch more lunch

As a bizarre finish to the day, we swung by one island that hosts a giant nesting area for what here are euphemistically called “flying foxes.” As we approached, we realised that these were distinctly NOT fox-like–it was an enormous colony of giant fruit bats! And we mean GIANT. The boatmen obligingly clapped and hollered until the whole colony woke up and circled around us in an amazing–if extremely creepy–way.

bat heaven “flying foxes” my ass! dive bomb central

Melanie the Safety Elephant

I would also like to take this opportunity to provide photographic proof to Mel’s parents that we did, indeed, make sure Melanie had a life jacket in the boat. See, no matter how sorry for herself Mel might sound on the phone, I am keeping her safe. So there.

island brel