Notes from Stephen, Wan, Kweilin, and Li

Li Tsun's homepage

Atom RSS for your feed reader

 

Ubud, Denpasar, Labuan Bajo: flight; swim; sunset walk; chess

We flew from Denpasar to Labuan Bajo this morning. Nyoman Sandi kindly drove us from Ubud to the Denpasar airport.

We passed the Tumbawa volcano during the flight. It erupted in the 1800s and spewed so much ash into the atmosphere that the world fogged over for a few days. The volcano is inactive now but we could make out its cone and crater clearly.

Labuan Bajo is a small town on the island of Flores. Flores is an island east of Bali that we've heard has good scuba diving and snorkeling and beaches. The island is much less developed than Bali. The town looked like it has one main street with several dive shops. We have yet to find an internet cafe and a local told us that phone calls are expensive and unreliable.

We took a taxi for a dollar (10,000 rupiah) to the New Bajo Beach Hotel, where we're staying for US$12 a night. It's a short drive from the main town, so it's quiet and it has its private beach. All rooms were full last night, but tonight we have the entire hotel to ourselves.

In fact, it seems like we have almost the entire island to ourselves. The only tourists we saw were a handful who flew with us on the plane. I'm not sure whether we came at a slow time of the week or whether tourism is generally slow here.

We swam in the ocean. The water is warm and clear and the beach is sandy.

As we dried off from our swim, some hotel employees gave us coconuts from one of the hotel's trees. We drank the coconut water and then chopped the coconuts open and ate the meat.

We walked along the beach at sunset. We saw some fishing boats. One fisherman had a lantern on his boat and was repairing a net.

I looked at our room's wobbly ceiling fan more nervously after our discussion of ceiling fans during our walk. A ceiling fan fell on my parents in Mexico. My mom got out of bed just before another one fell on her bed in Malaysia. Both times the victims escaped injury. I hope our room's ceiling fan is lighter than it looks, in case it falls on us tonight.

Kweilin prompted my dad and I to exercise in our room. We did sit-ups, push-ups, dips, and squats.

My dad played chess with one of the hotel employees tonight. It looks like local evening entertainment is television, newspaper, and chess. My dad said he lost badly.

posted by Li at 3:39 AM