Flores

Hello and welcome back to Naturally Adventurous with Charlie and Ken.

On the last episode we chatted about the island of Komodo and the amazing Komodo dragon and Ken started taking us up into the mountains of Flores And he finished in rather dramatic fashion by describing quite a large earthquake.

So that's pretty much where we got to.

So we're going to continue through the island of Flores and this rather amazing time that he found himself.

I'll just mention that the first I heard of this was a i think you you sent me like a new a link to a news article about this huge earthquake in florida and you said something like um i always manage to find something fun to do on my birthday so uh

was it was was it actually a birthday that it hit it was uh i think it was birthday eve

And this was one of the birds I was most keen to see in the region, in the Lesser Sundas.

So that was great.

Whatever the reason, the Neanderthals disappeared from history, leaving only their genes in modern humans and their bones in archaeological sites.

The Homo floresiensis of the island of Flores in Indonesia tell a different story.

They survived perhaps until 50,000 years ago, but they do not appear to have any close relationship with modern humans, including the Rampasasa pygmy group that lives in the same region today.

They evolved to become small on their island through a process known as insular dwarfism, in which isolated species tend to develop smaller body sizes because resources are scarce.

This is why I mentioned the Garden of Eden, because when there's a new species found, most of the time, not every time, but most of the time, it ends up being over in Atlantis, Indonesia.

And what I'm referring to is like the Flores Islands.

And this is where you find like maybe the giants, or, you know, that might be, let's say, three meters tall or around eight or nine feet tall, or maybe even taller than that, and they have these skeletal remains.

And every once in a while, they find something, and then it gets taken away or something happens to it, you know.

The other thing is the hobbits, which is the, you know, the dwarves and things, you know, smaller people.

So they have the giants, and they also have the, you know, the hobbit type of people, and they find these skeletal remains.

generally in and around Flores, which is part of Indonesia.

These are, I think, part of the evidence as well, but some of that evidence gets taken away once in a while, and you don't see or hear about it.

anyway.

Homo florenciensis? also known as florisman or hobbit yes is an extinct species of archaic humans that inhabited the island of floris indonesia until the arrival of modern humans about 50 000 years ago yeah

see so this could be true but some accounts claim that they get small enough to fit in the palm of your hand Which, you know, if you're only three feet tall and you got a little baby, I can see it being that size.

We're back talking about the Menehun? Yes.

I thought this was a really interesting one, kind of unique.

So there was, um, earthquake, uh, back in August, um, that impacted residents of Flores which is East Nusa Tenggara.

Um, and they, it's been getting quite a lot of press actually.

I think that, that the tourism minister seems to have a, a sweet spot for this, but they've just announced that they are going to launch the Camino de Flores.

Um, so very much this idea of a pilgrimage route like the Camino de Santiago in Spain, the super famous one, that they're going to link these kind of spiritual sites with festivals and other tourism sites.

Um, but it's a little bit of a pilot, so they're, they're going to do this, uh, w- have 70 people walk 70 kilometers from one part to one part and kind of assess it and see is this feasible and then perhaps plan later routes and eventually come out with, you know, standards and risk profile because, you know, [laughs] this sounds like adventure travel to me and you need a, [laughs] you need a good safety plan, risk and management in place for that.

So you, you could set up any walk, but you need to make sure that it's supported by the locals, the locals are keen on it, and that it, it's going to contribute and not be to the detriment, I think, of the environment that it's going through.

Yeah, totally agree with that.

It has survived ice ages, droughts, and cyclones, but whether the Komodo dragon can survive mass tourism is not yet known.

In recent years, Komodo Island, along with its supply base of Labuan Bajo on the nearby and much bigger island of Flores, has been at the sharp end of Indonesia's drive to expand its tourism industry.

Joko Widodo, Indonesia's president until two years ago, said that he wanted to create 10 new Balis, aiming to bring more jobs and high incomes to his country.

Bali has long been Indonesia's top tourist destination, bringing in vast amounts of foreign exchange and providing jobs to Balinese and to migrant workers from across the country.

The incident prompted a temporary closure.

"Mr.

Widodo's plan has been just too successful," says Cecilia Lenita Jemana, a marketing manager for the Labuan Bajo Flores Tourist Author-Authority, a body set up to implement the ex-president's ideas.

The region is struggling to cope with phenomenal growth.

And there's a serious version of this idea from a different island.

On Flores in Indonesia, home of the tiny extinct species Homo floresiensis, the local Leo people have long told stories about small, hairy human-like creatures.

An anthropologist named Gregory Fourth spent decades studying those stories and wrote a whole book arguing they might preserve a memory of a real hominin.

Most of his colleagues aren't convinced, but he's a legitimate scholar asking a real question.

Those were on my radar.

I sorta knew that Komodo was one of the islands in the Lesser Sundas, but I just hadn't localized, okay, where is this dragon and what's entailed in seeing it? So it really retained this mystique to me for a long time, and it really wasn't until I was about to set up this trip a couple months ago that I realized, okay, you can fly right into this town on the island of Flores called Labo and Bajo.

And from there, you are only about an hour and 15 minutes in a speedboat from the island of Komodo And then it appears to be pretty well set up for people to see this dragon, which I guess it's the biggest lizard, right? Yes.

Crocodiles are a lot bigger, but it's the biggest lizard.

So it went from impossibly exotic to, oh, I can definitely do this.

And part of what I hadn't realized is that going to see the dragon works very easily in conjunction with the birding side of visiting Flores.

So Komodo is a different island, but it's really quite close to Western Flores.

And if you do want to go to Komodo, you do actually fly into Flores rather than Komodo itself,

So.

Uh, he's, there is a, uh, couple of Dutch explorers, uh, who heard about the, uh, Indonesia's Flores island's land crocodile-

Mm-hmm

... that lived on the nearby island of Komodo, and they went to go see the same beach for themselves.