Ende at last!
March 7th
At first sight, Ikhlas seemed horrible. I didn't really know why, maybe it was because it was all clean and white and brightly-lit and it was full of Europeans - which was a bit of a culture shock after our stay in Kupang. But after a while i got used to it and it was actually quite a nice place really. They did pretty good vegetarian food, although it was a bit bland and uninspired - but that wasn't a worry after a week of rice! And their chips were great!
On the ferry trip i'd started to feel ill and now i was feeling really sick. I had half a bottle of beer and felt so bad i had to go to bed.
The next morning i wasn't feeling quite so bad, but i was still definitely sick. I was aching all over, coughing, my glands were swollen and i felt totally spaced out and tired.
Later on we walked into town, which was about one and a half kilometres away. There was nothing there really and mostly everything was closed as it was afternoon. But it was immediately obvious that Flores was a much less poor island than Timor. There was more variety of food for sale, a lot of the houses had nice, well-kept gardens and there were more private cars.
We had a look at Ende beach, which is an unexciting strip of black volcanic sand next to a harbour. And that was it for town! It was very small and there wasn't much going on.
There were a lot of people staying at Ikhlas who had been on the ferry with us, three english men, one welsh man, a swiss woman, an american man and four australian men. They'd all come from Darwin to Kupang and most of them were following a roughly similar route to the one we were taking. This Australia/Asia overland route seemed to be catching on in a big way at that time. It hadn't been long since Indonesian immigration regulations had made it impossible, by only allowing you to leave from the same port you arrived at. That had been changed for a couple of years or so then and now you could travel in one end of Indonesia and out the other. No doubt we'd be meeting some of these people here and there over the next couple of months.
We decided not to keep on with the local ferries - partly after the one that had brought us to Ende, but mainly because it was taking too long and we just wanted to be getting on our way to India. To get the ferry to Sumbawa, the next island west meant a very long three hundred and fifty kilometre bus trip, over bad roads in the wet season, to Labuhanbajo. And someone said it took twenty four hours to get from there to Sumbawa anyway! These ferries only ran three times a week too. Then after that, we'd have to get to Lombok, then Bali, then Java, then Sumatra - before we could even get out of Indonesia.
We decided to wait a week instead, and catch the Pelni ship "Kelimutu" which would take us all the way to Surabaya in east Java in about three days. It cost 118,000 rupiah, which seemed pretty cheap. And they were reputed to be good boats too. From Surabaya, we should have been able to catch a fast train to Jakarta and then another short trip to the ferry port and Sumatra. Apparently you could get a ferry from Pakanbaru, in the middle of Sumatra, which would take you to Indonesia's closest island to Singapore. From there, it was just a short hop to that big island city, one of the world's main crossroads.
The Kelimutu was due to leave Ende in a week, on Wednesday, March the 15th, on the full moon - which seemed to be a good time to go to sea for a few nights.
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While we we'd been waiting for the ferry to leave Kupang, a hawker sold me a copy of the Kupang Pos, the local daily paper, which had a story in it about a bus crash in Flores, where an irish tourist died. At Ikhlas, we met a german woman who had survived that crash, with only bruises, cuts and probably a bit of concussion. She said the bus rolled five times, down a two hundred metre drop. She didn't remember how she got out, but she managed to make it back up to the road with only one shoe on.
She was off to Lombok the next day. On the same plane, they were sending the body of the dead man to Jakarta on his way back to Ireland. She seemed quite inspired, in a way, by the experience. I think coming that close to death and surviving had made her see life a bit differently.
The following day, we'd planned to go to Moni, which is a village up in the hills about fity kilometres from Ende, near mount Kelimutu. But after walking into town to go to the bank and the Pelni office, we were both so exhausted that there was no way we were going anywhere. Nicki was ill too now and i could hardly move and had to spend the whole day lying down.