Thursday 23rd of May 2019 - Komodo Island

We dropped anchor off Komodo island about 7am this morning - as we were passing through the bay the sun rose and it was a beautiful fine day.  At 7am it was around 26C and 70% humidity.. so I knew we were in for a hot day.

We had to go over to the island using the ships tenders (for those who don't know these are smallish boats that are used for transport and in an emergency).

Ships Tender

Our tour was Komodo Dragon Adventure with Pink Beach.

Don't worry - that's just a statue at the entrance to the walk!

It was quite a hot and dusty track from where we walked off the dock along the nature path, uneven path - but thankfully mostly flat.  It was 32-33C and about 80% humidity, so walking the 2-3 Kilometres around the track was a challenge.

Komodo Dragons!

About 1/3 of the way along we encountered our first Komodo Dragon. Actually it was 4 of them, basking in the sun near a water source (it's called the lake, but as you can see from the pictures, it's more like a puddle.  There were tons of tourists around taking photos and the Dragons seemed quite used to it.  They are bloody huge things - the ones we saw were about 2.5 meters long (they  grow to 3m).

 After a few minutes a baby Komodo dragon appeared, obviously confused at all the tourists - it stayed a respectful distance from the adults (apparently Babies get eaten regularly by adults).  A few minutes later 2 more dragons turned up, and they started hissing and fighting each other! (apparently it's mating season, so the males tend to fight a lot, males outnumber females on the island, so there are a lot of clashes).

Baby Komodo Dragon

The guides who took us on the walk don't seem to have much fear, taking on those huge things with a simple forked stick if they got too near tourists.  After returning from the walk we went through the inevitable shopping area (set up so you have to go through it to exit the walking tracks) - and then we boarded a boat to head to the Pink Beach.  The boat ride sucked a lot - the boat we ended up with was really crappy, not enough seats for the number of people on our tour, lots of delays caused by obnoxious members of the tour (seriously, you have to walk 200m, how can you be 20 mins late?).

Pink Beach

We headed across the bay to the Pink Beach - it was very picturesque, not much shade but nice to just sit and look at the shore - Dave went for a swim, it was apparently very cold water.  The pink colour is caused by the fragments of pink coral that mixed with the sand.

Dave swimming at Pink Beach

After about an hour at the beach we were dropped off back at the pier and took a tender back to the ship.

It was a good day! even if I was sore for 2 days afterwards from all the exercise and sitting on very uncomfortable deats all day.