Like i said before, my lack of research before going to Indonesia ended up playing not-so-nice games with me. Upon arrival at the airport of Denpasar, Bali, i saw one of these backgrounds where you can take a photo, with a famous landmark of the country, if you know what i mean. On this background image I saw a STUNNING island and in front of it was a bicycle that you could sit on to pretend you’re riding a bike on that island. This seemed to be a big hit for the Asian people to take a photo at. what impressed me, though, was the island in the background, not the bike (i mean i live in the Netherlands, no bicycle can impress me anymore). So, knowing that we were going to hike a mountain, i thought THIS WAS THE MOUNTAIN and suddenly i felt sooo enthusiastic about it. What i didn’t realize, however, was that the island didn’t really look that big or high and it just didn’t make any sense that you’d need to hike 9h to get to the top of it.. (well we didn’t know about these 9 hours at that point, but still.. didn’t occur to me even later), so when i insisted that we go on top of Rinjani at night (you can read about Rinjani in the post about Lombok) to see the sunrise, i imagined that’s what i’d see, but i thought i just couldn’t see it yet from the basecamp even if it looked high enough, i thought it just wasn’t the right angle and that THAT VIEW was maybe on the other side of the peak of the mountain. So i was kinda disappointed, but then i figured that this was actually Padar Island, which we were going to see anyway! This island here..
It doesn’t look like a 9-hour hike, does it? 😀 hahahaa yeah.. because it’s not 😀 to get to the top of Padar Island, you basically go on a bunch of steps for 20 min and there you have it – a stunning view, but also a stunning.. crowd of people, so again – “Instagram vs reality” kind of example here.. You had to stand in a queue to take a photo at the nice spots in a way that wouldn’t show any people behind you coming up the stairs.
Another very interesting thing were the pink beaches they brought us to. Both around Flores and around Lombok. Well, you can see there are pink particles on the beach, but it doesn’t look super pink actually. There are certain parts of the beaches where you could see a bit of a higher concentration of the pink pieces. What makes the sand pink is a coral, called organ pipe coral. When it washes up ashore it breaks down and gives the sand this typical colour. You can see a photo of it in the gallery below. The real sad thing, was the rubbish on the beaches. to be honest, I’ve modified the photos with Photoshop to remove the trash on the beach on one of the pink beach photos. It was really so sad that the Indonesian people don’t keep their nature clean. I did mention this to a few guides we had on the way and only one of them felt bad about throwing his trash and actually collected some trash on the way. i really tried to convince them that they must treasure their nature and protect it, it starts from them. we, in bukgaria, have such an amazing nature, of course, and we also don’t keep it clean. this maddens me really, maddens me a lot. if we had such gorgeous rainforests, if we had elephants, turtles, etc, it would’ve made me even more pissed. We don’t protect our oceans, we don’t protect our seas, for me, this is a real crime. don’t throw your plastic trash on the ground, on the beach, in the forest, there are containers for it, recycle them, please!
Check out the gallery below with Padar Island as well as some awesome birds we saw and other interesting things that didn’t fit in other posts. If you are curious about anything – post a comment and i’ll reply to you asap 🙂
Islands of Indonesia
Birds of Indonesia
Wildlife of Indonesia
