My views do not necessarily reflect the views of my employer.
June 13, 2023
I’m not sure exactly where Komodo Island is, but it’s an island in Indonesia that’s 6 sea days from Brisbane and 2 sea days from Singapore. The only people who were allowed to go ashore were the ones on tour. Luckily they had a crew tour! It was my first time here after working with Princess for 5 years, so who knew when I would have the chance again! We took the water shuttle to this very precarious looking dock.
I was surprised that this was the only way available to get ashore – there was no rail! No wonder the whole water shuttle operation was taking so long! We walked along the pier waving at all of the guests who had finished their tour and were waiting to go back to the ship. I didn’t understand why everyone was waiting in the sun instead of hanging out on the island until the line went down.
We were guided to the National Park, broken into groups and assigned our guide. We also had some body guards with long sticks as tall as a person to protect us from the dragons.
We walked through the jungle for about 20 minutes before we came to the watering hole.
And there was a dragon!
The guide said that they were very fast when they hunted – they could eat about 80% of their weight, but they only ate about once a month, so this guy was fine to hang out with.
We stood and looked at it. It didn’t move much. The experience kind of reminds me of when I went to see Mount Rushmore. There it is! It looks like it did in the pictures. Now what do we do? I actually hadn’t looked for any pictures of dragons ahead of time because I wanted to be surprised. But there it is! Now what do we do?
There was a little dragon off to the side of the crowd. We watched it climb a tree and leap off – I’ll post the video on facebook. We also saw another one sleeping in the shade. We climbed through the hills which reminded me of California in some places and Papeete in others. And then we circled round back to the ship.
I was hoping to get some local food from the market, but they were only selling cup of noodles and sodas (both of which I could get on the ship). So we joined the line to get back on the water shuttle. There was a cool breeze that made it much more pleasant than it looked coming in. I think we spent more time waiting in that line to get back on the ship than we did exploring the island, but we made the best of our time hanging out. Another crew member had been on that tour before and they’d seen 20 dragons. Apparently they are more active in the morning. I was very satisfied with the 3 that I saw.