Angelino: lost in Flores
Author's note: Our guide on Flores, Angelino, is a kind and helpful person who struggles every day against all the hardships involved in making a living in an exploited and forgotten developing country. Here, many people like him earn their daily bread by taking tourists on trips in jeeps owned by rich Chinese. Of the money the employers take, the drivers probably get no more than 10%. Maybe in the following story this fact gets overlooked somewhat - hence the reason for this note. We owe him that.
The ruins of Maumere
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aumere, Flores, Indonesia: East of Java, Bali and Lombok we find the extremely poor, catholic Flores Island welcoming us one sunny morning. The small city wounded by earthquakes survives among the ruins of its old houses that have never been reconstructed. The tourists the make it this far are few and far between and naturally there's quite a bit of competition for them among the local guides. Finding a guide is absolutely fundamental if you want to cross the island. There are very few buses and trains are non-existent. But chosing a good guide is like the lottery. We didn't win.Vote Angelino!
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nce we got off the plane, we happened to come across a young boy who, in fluent English, convinced us to get in his car and take us to a small hotel (his uncle's, of course). We make a time to meet in the afternoon to bargain about a price for a tour of the island in the days to come. The pros about him are as follows: excellent English, similar age to us, nice, car at his disposal. The cons are: the price. As stingy as two Scotsmen, we launch into an exhausting bargaining session, we were certain we'd get the better of him. Result: our friend leaves us with an "I'll think about it" and disppears into the ether. Having lost the first round ofdeal-making, we meet a series of other guides, we weigh up offers and, after a lot of thinking, we chose Angelino: middle-aged, thin and bearded, serene but very persistent. Why did we chose him? That's a question we're still asking ourselves.Angelino drive a car
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he following morning, our man Angelino meets us at sunrise for our departure. In front of us are many miles and several days in his company - through forests, volcanoes, isolated villages and dirt roads. On the first leg of our tour he surprises us immediately when we try to understand why we've stopped by the side of the road to look at the bark of a tree. His English vocabulary consists of about 10 words. But why didn't we notice that yesterday?What language did we bargain in? Oh well, we can't go back now. We'll try to use sign language. Our guide drives along the dirt and stone roads, totally relaxed - a little too relaxed actually -especially when we're going round corners or when we meet other vehicles coming in the opposite direction. Every ten minutes he lights up a Kretek, smelly cloves cigarettes with mildly halluconigenic effects, and his car starts to reveal the signs of shoddy repairs. God preserve us!
Terror in paradise
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fter an entire day of bunny hops along the island, various trips, some of them incomprehensible, and failed attempts at conversation with our man Angelino, we finally arrive at Moni, in the interior, at the foot of a volcano that we'll visit tomorrow morning. We find somewhere to stay and after a walk in the rice paddies we discover our little paradise. A pond full of warm water and a waterfall over the rocks. Trousers off! We dive straight in.It must have been the atmosphere, or the tiredness but somehow we are struck with a brilliant idea: Let's swim right under the waterfall...yes go on! So that's what we o and here we are under the powerful stream of water that... in two seconds flat drags us down into an unexpected whirpool. We manage to get out somehow after drinking a good deal of water. We know all about potential gastro-intestinal problems - but what could we do! So just to spoil the magical, poetic moment, we put two fingers down our throat.... we go back to our hut cursing ourselves. Maybe noone saw us. Here's hoping.
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