Surely the Ende is in sight??!
Trip Start
Jun 25, 2011
1
42
62
Trip End
Dec 01, 2012
Ende, East Nusa Tenggara, Indonesia
Sunday, October 16, 2011
I’ll give you a quick quote from the Lonely Planet about the road we would be spending the next 12 hours on: "The serpentine, potholed east-west Trans-Flores Highway is long and slow but never boring. It skirts waterfalls, conquers mountains leads to the incredible multi-coloured volcanic lakes of Kelimutu and connects both coasts"… the part we glossed over when we read it as well was Potholed! It is without a doubt the most potholed stretch of land on this planet (that I’ve driven on anyway!) Don’t get me wrong at all, it is tremendously scenic in every possible way, some of the best we’d seen anywhere so far, we were seeing in reality that Flores was not some arid dusty wasteland that it had looked from the ocean but instead it was lush and green and fertile and very very beautiful, the Portuguese named it Flowers (Flores) for this beauty. As stunning as it all was, with amazing views from the top of some of the mountains we criss crossed up through endless hairpin bends. I didn’t enjoy it… at all! Between the circling of towns looking for passengers and constant stopping for toilet breaks every hour or so, I was getting a bit frustrated. The road in places was absolutely atrocious, highway my arse, the thing with only realistically having one main road on the island is that whenever theres a landslide or theres road works going on, the road doesn’t close. Instead everyone is left to make their own way through it, over it or around it, between this and the potholes (im not even going start on about the potholes) but the end of it I felt like Id been sitting in a washing machine for the 14 hours. About 12 o clock we arrived in the town of Ruteng to pick up some more passengers. We were starving by now but there was nowhere in sight to get some food, except for a small stand selling fried sweet snacks, that was outside the toy shop next to the office of the bus company. It was all as random as it sounds trust me! Got chatting to the very camp Indo guy who worked at the toy shop - who started joking asking if I was from Westlife. They are obsessed with them out here! We sat back on the bus, eager to get going again but just then the heavens opened and we were stuck in the biggest rain storm for the next half hour that we'd seen since the Philippines. Had to stop Karen getting out in the thunder and lightening for a splash in the puddles!
Yes just like every other scheduled thing in Indo, we were late. The only slightly lucky thing was the fact we slept through large parts of it, youd be surprised how sleepy you get sitting in one position for any length of time. At one stage, I was nodding in between the land of nod, trying my best to stay awake. I couldn’t win. I woke up with a bang! Id managed to nod off and drift then my head slumped to oneside, as im sure everyone has done, and in doing so I managed to headbutt your man beside me! Luckily he was asleep as well and when it woke him up he didn’t have a clue what had happened… so I kept my eyes closed and pretended to be asleep!!!
We arrived into Ende in the dark around 9 o clock or so, and just pulled a name out of the lonely planet to stay at. Now for the upside of the door to door service, we were dropped off outside the hotel. It wasn’t the worst looking hotel, there was no-one around though, Ende is not exactly touristy in any way. We went for the cheapest room, probably the cheapest room wed stayed in so far. It was grand like, bearable for one night anyway. It did have the smallest fan in the room that Id ever seen! It was like something youd stick on your dashboard of a car. Was like an asthmatic blowing at you! We were shattered though so it didn’t take long to fall back to sleep, even with plenty of sleep on the bus, we were still completely exhausted. Not my favourite journey by a long long way!
Disclaimer
The journey was pretty horrendous alright but bearable, I think I fared a lot better than Tom. Ontop of all of this we hadn’t eaten all day – the first and only meal came when we stopped at a roadside padang restaurant (padang is food that has already been cooked and is served up cold) at around 5pm. We devoured our meal, although maybe with all the potholes it was for the best that we travelled on an empty stomach! The hotel room was pretty grim but we had one of the best nights sleep after a day like that. This was definitely one of those ‘character building/relationship strengthening’ type experiences!
