When we were booking our holiday, we were interested in spending some more time in this area of Indonesia, but wanted to do some exploring. We chose to book a driver to take us overland across Flores Island. What an amazing trip! Flores has so much to see, in addition to being a gorgeous place to drive around. It is very mountainous, so even the main highway is a winding two-lane up and down steep slopes. Our driver Aristo was great, taking things easy, and showed us some gorgeous spots.
First stop was Melo Village, where you can see a traditional Manggarai house, try on traditional clothing, and drink some serious coffee. We sat in the house for a while and met the head man of the village, then posed for photos. The house is still in use as a meeting area for the community.
After a quiet, rainy night at Mbeliling Ecolodge, we headed off across the island. We stopped for a view of the spiderweb rice fields. Each wedge is is one person’s rice fields, with the village dividing them out this way to the people. The view was quite lovely, and it was an interesting solution to land distribution. At certain times of the year the village has ceremonies “of thanks and praise” (as described by Aristo) at the center of the web. During the ceremony they will put a chicken or an egg in the center of the “web”.
Also on that same day we stopped off to see the Hobbit Cave. Here archaeologists found remains of Homo floresiensis, very short human ancestors sometimes referred to as hobbits. Unfortunately, the museum there is undergoing renovations, so the fossil display is just stacked up in an old room. They did let us go in to see it, but there wasn’t much to see. The fossil there is just a copy anyway – the real one is in a museum in Jakarta.
One of the things we got used to on this trip were the many times it seemed like we might have been the only foreigners people had seen in a long time. At the Hobbit Cave that was definitely the case. The small children hanging out followed us all over, giggling about how funny we were.
In Ruteng we stayed at the tiny Hobbit Hill Guest House in a simple bungalow a little outside town. It has a gorgeous view and cool mountain temperatures, which was a delight after the heat of lower altitudes.
