Mon 6 Jan
Part 1
Part 2
Part 3
Part 4
Part 5
We get up at dawn and meet the two drivers the Bintang’s owner has organised for us. They’re rather portly gentlemen wrapped up in thick coats with bulbous helmets astride tiny looking mopeds. It’s fresh, but the sun has risen with the promise of heat, so I’m dressed in my favourite green t-shirt and the shorts I’ve been wearing for the past two months. We climb aboard and spiral up Kelimutu. The road thins and then breaks into broken chunks of tarmac. We never slow down, not even to cross a stream that drops off the side of the mountain through a cloud. The whole trip takes about an hour.
The path climbs away from our smiling drivers – who we wave off as we want to later walk down the mountain. It doesn’t look too far to the summit. But it’s difficult to judge. The rocks are a peculiar shape – they look fossilised and made mostly of voids, if that makes any kind of sense – and when piled up on top of each other they exaggerate and force your sense of perspective even further. We have no idea if it’s going to take ten or fifty minutes to get to the craters.
This sensation is even more profound when we reach the top and look over the barriers at the two lakes below. The big one is a muddy green, the smaller one, turquoise. But the uniformity of their colour and tone make them seem no bigger than a puddle. There is no upended body in either body of water; whether it was recovered by the police or sunk beneath the opaque surface, we’ll never know. Only the flapping ribbon of the ‘POLICE DO NOT CROSS’ tape down by the lake’s shore suggests anything untoward has ever happened. It seems incredible that some poor deputy had to scramble down a steep rock face over sharp, loose stones to erect a completely redundant tape barrier – especially as it’s almost impossible to breathe with the sulphur in the air thrown off by the lakes. But then thinking that just highlights the peculiar voyeuristic quality of travelling. You’re not really part of anywhere, so it’s easy to be quite flippant about things. I guess if it was a member of my family, I’d try and get them out.
We walk with open mouths to the third lake; this one is British Racing Green. The notice boards show pictures of the lakes in brilliant orange, red and yellow hues, so I can’t help feel a little cheated that all Kelimutu has to offer is three different shades of green. Two figures walk across the ridgeback. It’s Mel and Miles.
Miles has recovered after yesterday’s encounter with the scorpion. This morning, I adopted a policy of shaking out my hiking boots before putting them on and even though the idea of being stung by a scorpion scares me, I do enjoy the thrill of being in a country where the wildlife is quite happy to f*ck with you.
We gather and look down to see both the north and south shore of Flores. This just adds further to the crazy scale of the place. With the blue skies, the pretty green hills and sparkling seas it’s like being in Mario Galaxy.
I walk with Miles down the mountain. Speaking in a precise and considered manner, he tells me he went travelling after reading On the Road, and although my first thought is, ‘boy, really?’ I remember this is exactly the sort of thing I would have said when I was nineteen too. Miles is a nice guy with a tiny intricate tattoo on his right ankle. He tells me about growing up in the centre of San Francisco with arty parents, who own an island on the East Coast and about the liberal arts college in Vermont he’ll enrol at when he returns to the States. In the middle of a coffee field his mobile rings and he takes a call from his mother. My singular failure at communicating with anyone in my family in any way other than by email makes me feel jealous.
About half way down, a man runs out of his home and down a dirt track towards us. He beckons for us to follow him and we end up sitting in his ‘garden’ – a point overlooking the valley – by his coffee harvest drying in the sun. Reading back that last sentence, I realise I sound like a colossal wanker. But then maybe I am what can I do? It happened; I was there and was made to drink the strongest cup of coffee in the world.
As our little group is going their separate ways tomorrow, plans are made back at the Bintang to go out, say farewell by inevitably swapping emails and try the local delicacy – a potato doughnut served with cheese. We choose the Bamboo Cafe, an establishment that enthusiastically offers its variation of this local delicacy as ‘Bamboo Super Potatoes’. They certainly are super and would go pretty well with chocolate too, but that’s just my opinion, I’m not a chef or anything.
During the meal, the talk inevitably turns to illness. The huge lump on S’ leg has started to shrunk thanks to Bijorn’s stash of out-of-date antibiotics and after a quick display that fairly freaks out the random Dutch couple who’ve joined us, the day closes with everyone’s best illness/emergency voiding stories.
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