Days One and Two: Kelimutu
…Sudden Stars
The first thing I really sat back and pinched myself about, assuring myself I was not dreaming, was that, yes, there are stars up in the sky tonight over Moni.
If I stick my head out the door in the evening in Jakarta, there are no stars to see. There is haze high up, and light reflecting off the sculpted towers that ring my residence – BNI, Four Seasons, Indosat. But nothing to look up and see.
Here in prosaic and calm but tourist-savvy Moni, there are stars shining in the sky, more than I can count. And constellations, none of which I can recognize, because I am in the Southern Hemisphere, and all of the reference points they teach us at Chicago’s Adler Planetarium when we are little just don’t measure up down here.
Seeing something vaguely inviting, but not being able to make it out, as I feel with these stars, perfectly encapsulates this condition I face when I arrive in Moni. There is nothing I like less than the prospect of arriving at a place for the first time at night. I like touching the ground somewhere with plenty of daylight, giving me the chance to walk around and starting to make two and two equal something it’s supposed to equal. At night, the world flattens out, colors disappear, and points don’t connect.
But, I was dragged to a boarding house with the claim that everything else in town was filled (probably true), and paid my US$7 for a night; and also paid my US$6 for a ride up to the top of The Mountain. And what else is there to say about Moni? That it gets cold, too an uncomfortable level at night? That’s it’s a lot less busy since the Bali bombing? Moni is a small little town that has the good fortune of being on the only “highway” through the island of Flores, and is also sited next to a natural wonder of the world. That’s all there is to it. Some people farm; others learn enough English to take money from people like me, and hang out the rest of the time. There ain’t much more to say.
But at night, there were *stars*.
Getting There is Half the….Half the what?
I arrive in Moni after working my way from the airport to the bus station in quiet little Maumere. Maumere’s airport is easily the most third world travel location I have ever been – we step off the plane onto a tarmac and walk to a dusty, hot and crowded room, fighting our way to the baggage claim. The biggest concern at this airport is not homeland security; it’s whether the baggage going on the planes is going to be too heavy for them to take off. They are weighing everything here not so that they can collect a fee for overages, but so the puttering engines can get you off of terra that may not necessarily be so firma.
At the bus station, still seated in an SUV “taxi” I rapidly have the arms of seven different punters reaching into the backseat and trying to take my bag (which is heavy, because a certain Indonesian World Bank staff-member who shall remain nameless has tricked the intern into dragging 15 editions of reports to the other end of the archipelago for his two Flores-based friends who will be in Jakarta two weeks later; apparently, hazing is not haram) so they can drive me to Moni. I ask when they leave; they all say 5 PM; it is 3:30.
The bus station is hot, and I see a van pulling away. I point, a man jumps out of the van, grabs my bag, throws it on the top of the van, and crawls up after it…and then the van starts to pull away. I am still standing in the driveway of the bus station. I charge, leap, grab onto one of the back railings, which many people will ride upon during our journey, and shout for them to let me on. This gets some puzzled looks, and there’s definitely a lack of comfort with the fact that I am speaking Indonesian; not because I am speaking Indonesian poorly – but because these folks are probably speakers of Leo or Sikka or one of the other tongues that disunite this small island within itself, let alone from the rest of Indonesia. (later I am to learn that only two of the local languagues have words for thank you; you’re welcome).
Then they let me on the bus; I say I want to go to Moni. They scoop me on board, piling me into the back (di belokang, that is) bench with five other people. And then they stop again. And the driver makes a dozen people get out. And they unload their cargo, and there is a bunch of shouting I don’t understand, and the dozen people look displeased but unsurprised, and I have the back bench to myself, and we are on our way.
Over twisting and turning roads, through mountains, bump bump bump – way high, down low, but never too slow. All manner of things are being thrown up onto the top of this bus – at one point on the way back to Maumere, a squealing pig, all four legs tied together. But usually, just a half dozen kids, young folks, who as the bus is accelerating around an unguarded curve up on a mountain, are moving themselves from the top, to the side, to the inside of the bus, with no care in the world. When one does this, I shake his hand, hoping whatever blessing is keeping him where he wants to be in this world will rub off upon me.
The weirdest moment came when we rounded one curve. An older looking man, shirtless, a machete in his hand, looks at the bus knowingly – it turns, he hops on, machete still in his right hand, and climbs up on back. I never quite figured out when he jumped off, and perhaps he is still with me.
The hidden purpose of this “field research” trip
Okay. Two of the eight case studies being used in the report I am writing are from the island of Flores. I even visited and researched an update of an unresolved situation described in one of the villages that was studied two years ago.
But, really, ever since I cracked open a Lonely Planet and saw a photograph of the lakes at Kelimutu on the island of Flores, I have wanted to come here. And, with that in mind, I pushed and pushed at work to get to make the trip, and there I was.
Flores is a strange island. Perhaps you’ve heard about the discovery of the "hobbit-sized" Flores Man. Well, if not, you have now. (Actually, I think it was a woman.) There was also the dwarf Flores Elephant. I think if you could clone these somehow, they’d make a nice chic pet for the Paris Hilton set. Speaking of flesh-eating lizards, the Komodo Dragon’s home is also next door; sometimes, it crosses the water, and visits the western end of Flores. The point I am trying to drive home is that Flores is a unique place.
But take away the dragons, the pet elephants, the pet human ancestor remains. Take away the surf and the jungle, most of the mountains, the twisting and turning roads, the good scuba locations at Pulau Besar a two hour boat ride from Maumere. What have you still got?
You’ve got Kelimutu.
Three lakes up in the mountains.
Try to imagine you are the person who millennia ago first discovered this spot. What went through your mind at that moment? You don’t know exactly what a volcano is, or what it does, or what it leaves behind. You don’t know how lakes form up in the mountains like this, or how such perfect walls got hollowed out of the rock. You certainly don’t know anything about chemistry, and how they make colors bloom forth in our natural world. Perhaps you’ve developed a system of belief; is it ready for this? Could you understand what you were looking at?
I’m still not sure I do.
There is the blue lake, water more sky-colored than anything on the horizon.
You can see the “red” lake in the background, too. Here’s me trying not to fall in while taking a picture of myself hovering over one of its walls. The lake is supposed to be “red” but it’s really more of a reddish-brown, and strictly appears black in these photos because of the sun.
Those two are right next to one another, separated by what must be a thin wall of rock, the blue and red-brown not quite ever coming together.
And off on its own is the black lake, its waters murkiest of all, it’s location off the horizon in just such a way that you need to wait until at least noontime to get some sunlight down on it. And, frankly, I just didn’t have time to sit for five hours.
But here’s the crazy part; the lakes change color every so often. The volcanic life that is going on underneath the lakes and rain from above will inject new minerals into the waters; blue will go green, black will get brown, reddish-brown will changes to really red. The lakes would be a holy site for the locals on their own without any of this; the changing colors must have made this setting seem even more awesome to the people who got here before the rest of us with our cameras and our chemistries.
On the way down…on the way back
We got up to the top of Kelimutu at about 5 AM, just as the sun was beginning to rise. Me and three other tourists beat two locals up the hill who wanted to sell us coffee. I wasn’t buying. The sun rose intensely, and just the mountains all around on the horizon were beautiful enough to merit their own attention.
But there were the lakes. Look, here’s another shot. And another. It’s worth taking a couple of different looks at.
It was a pretty quiet bunch of us up there for about an hour, and then we were intercepted by a gaggle of Indonesian bank employees who were on some kind of family retreat trip from Flores’ larger towns, along with a couple of annoying western European tourists who were photographing *everything*, including themselves with all of the children of the bank employees, one-by-one.
A little before eight, I started working my way down. I decided I was going to make a hike of it. It turns out that a couple who had come up with me in the oh-so-freezing-cold truck had also decided to do this; and they were Americans. And, oh this is rich, one of them was an undergraduate classmate of Ms. Anna Fewell, my occasional travel companion in Jakarta. It is a small, small universe. Of course, it could just be that there are like 100 Americans every generation who choose to make a vocation of Indonesia; Anna, her friend Andy, and I, are three of those 100.
“Wouldn’t want to be in any club that would have me as a member.”
Karen and Andy and I hiked down 15 KM, but Karen was certain it was more like 20. The specifics are not important. The mountain left my legs feeling like marmite. The mountain, I say, but it was really more like hill after hill after hill, a gigantic volcanic structure. Tropical palms giving way to leafy deciduous trees, giving way to bamboo forests, giving way to perfectly terraced rice paddies.
I wanted to take a nap amid all the walking; but I didn’t necessarily want to leave.
But, it was time to go. Cram myself into the back of another van, with another carsick child, and four more hours of rounding curves, once again in the dark, ready to return to Maumere to get to work, the, um, “real” purpose of this whole journey.
