The Wandering Scot

I’m in Labuan Bajo, Indonesia.  I successfully took a speedboat tour over to Komodo Island, to see the famous Komodo Dragons.

I got there early, ahead of the main tourist rush, and met up with a Park Ranger guide.   Fairly near the harbor we encountered our first dragon.  This one was clearly well habituated to humans and looked like he was the “dragon on duty”.   But he was a real live Komodo Dragon and a very big one, with a massive neck and a flickering tongue.

My guide kindly took a photo of me behind the dragon.  The photo makes it look as though I was quite close, but actually I was a safe 8-12 feet away.

As we were getting ready to leave this one, the ranger spotted another large dragon nearby.  This one was very clearly a wild unhabituated dragon and he ran away very quickly when he saw the nasty evil humans heading towards him.  We tried to follow but lost him.

We strolled through the woods, seeing occasional wild boar or deer.  The dragons typically dine on deer.   The ranger told me that sometimes the dragons build their own nests for their eggs, but often they will coopt a nest built by megapodes (a local bird species), which build very large nest mounds over many years.

We visited a viewing platform where in the past they had fed the dragons and tourists had been able to see lots of visiting dragons.  But that has been discontinued.

As we returned towards the harbor we saw another large dragon.  This one was sitting in the shade, as it was starting to get too hot for them.  This one was also well habituated to humans and let me get some good shots.

So three dragons in total.  Hurrah!  But we actually saw no dragons in the main section of the hike, perhaps partly because the wild unhabituated dragons try to avoid people.

Since I was in Flores, I took a trip out to the Liang Bua “Hobbit” Cave, where they found the first of the Homo floresiensis (aka “Hobbit”) skeletons.

The cave itself is tall (maybe 40 feet?) but quite shallow.  More of a deep alcove than what I think of as a true cave, with grotesque stalactites dangling from the roof.  At the back there are opening down to smaller inner caves, but I believe all the fossils were all found in the outer cave.  There are signs of archaeological work, including the protruding ends of plastic sheets which are presumably covering re-buried areas.

Replica “Hobbit” skull

There is a small but useful site museum.  They have good signage explaining the fossils and their context.   The signage notes dryly that there has been considerable scientific controversy over the status of the Flores skeletons and they quote Tolkien, saying:

The hobbits “suddenly became, by no wish of their own, both important and renowned, and troubled the counsels of the Wise and the Great”.

They have a replica of the first “Hobbit” skeleton.

I was the only tourist there.  From their log book they got no-one yesterday and only a couple the day before.  So I guess this is less of a tourist magnet than I had expected.