South East Asia Escapade

We were picked up by Ivan, our local guide and driver for the next 5 days. Ivan is a Timor-Leste / Flores Indonesian who speaks good english and has studied botanics, as well having an insatiable travellers spirit and great sense of humour.

He explained to us that the Indonesian people are a combination of the Indochina and Melanesian people, and that Flores is the island where these meet. It is also where the Islamic and Catholic religions meet, being Islam more predominant in west Indonesia and Catholicism in east Indonesia.
Previous to the arrival of modern people, Flores was inhabited by Homo floriensis, a pygmy archaic human, the remains of which are the smallest to ever be found.

Flores (flowers) was named so by the portuguese when it when missionaries arrived in the 16th century. It comes to no surprise that this island is called so beacuse at a closer glance one can see that it is a garden of eden where so many food, spices and wood types grow wild. The locals need just take a walk in the back garden wilderness to get food of all types.
This is some of what grows here... cinnamon, vanilla, cloves, nutmeg, hazelnut, macadamia, cashew, coffee, cocoa, wild sweet potato, pinapple, bananas of all sizes and colours, oranges, rambutan, dragon fruit, snake fruit, etc. Eucalyptus, white majogany, dark mahogany, teak, bamboo, etc.

On our drive through the island all we needed to do is stop and pick something off a tree, or buy it for next to nothing feom the locals who pick it to sell.

Anyhow... on our first day we visited a spiderlike rice fields. They were designed so so as to avoid wats between clans. Each clan had a circle and in each clan a family had a pizza slice of the circle. The most powerful people of each clan eere entitled to the outer, and larger, rings of the circle.
A group of teenagers from the nearby school accompanied us up the path while showing us all the wild fruit and plants growing in their back garden. Coffee beans on branches, pinaples sprouting around the path, a plant they pulled out for us to smell seemed a mentholated remedy for the common cold or breathing dificulty, etc. Quite mind blowing!

Ivan showed us how the Asian make their Betel Nut Chewing (a combination of betel nut, betel leaves, and powdered red coral) for its narcotic and stimulant effect. Most of the elderly people have red mouths and rotten teeth as a result.

We stopped at a local Warung for lunch, which proved to be ridiculously cheap, and afterwards Ivan stopped us at an Arak production place, a local liquor made from palmtrees the taste of which wasn't much unlike grappa or spanish orujo.Leia mais