Giant Carnivore Lizards

for crying out loud.

13.11.2008 - 16.11.2008 36 °C

So the Gili's were very sweet and definitely worth a visit. Chilled is good I have decided. Anyway, time is in relatively short order and as such it was important to get cracking with the rest of the trip. To Bali for the night. Stayed in Kuta. Think costa del sol but more expensive and no copies of the Sun available. Unappealing. Took a flight to Luaban Bajo. Geev insisted on calling it Loban Banjo but close enough I suppose.

We wanted to get to Komodo and less time means more cash so we threw some dollars at it and got ourselves a boat.... and 2 cases of beer. Just in case. 48 hours in the middle of nowhere with 2 dudes who speak no English. What can you do? Well we saved the beer for later and slept, ate and chatted about the copious numbers of photos we took. To that in a bit. We got to Rinca after a few hours and we went trekking off in search (and I quote Geev's dad in the title) Komodo Dragons.

They are apparently the source of the Chinese fascination with all things dragonlike. The actual story is that ths ancient chick gave birth to a son and a dragon. You have to bear with this for a second but the mother was some sort of virgin goddess (for those living in the UK where such occurrences are thin on the ground think the virgin mary with a tan and extra arms - I made up the extra arms bit to make it easier to differentiate) . They were separated at birth and one day the man came across teh dragon in the wild. He raised his sword/spear/shotgun - i forget which - at which point his mother appears, explains the ties of kith and kin and all is well. From this point the men and women of Rinca and Komodo lived harmoniously on the islands. The degree of harmony being debatable as the humans don't kill the dragons but the inverse is not so true. Any way, please hold onto your beverages, put your tray table into the upright position and clench your... teeth. Behold, the 8th wonder of the World, I give you......Giant Carnivore Lizards!!!!!

Which I feel you will agree is pretty damn cool. They are not too friendly and you are lucky to see any on Komodo but on Rinca about 20 metres down the path there were a couple of females fighting each other one defending and the other attacking a nest. If you bent down it was like Godzilla. We soon realised this was not a great idea as they run like the wind and bite like, well, fucking big lizards. They also have a pretty cool tail whip action which you wouldnt want to be within reach of.

Geev got some video of said events but all I have with me are photos compressed to the smallest size possible so they can be transmitted onto the interweb, cloud thingumyjig for you to not really see properly. Technology truly knows no bounds.

Hit Komodo the next day but really saw all the action on Rinca. Gets to be about 40 degrees in the middle of the day so we went and did some snorkelling to cool off. We figured it would be cool but had no idea it was going to be cooler than the dragon stuff. We managed to swim with Manta Rays. Proof available below: