Sunday 1 March – chased by a dragon

Rowan was struck down with the terrible runs last night, he had a very bad night up and down to the loo, so was not able to join us on our Komodo dragon hike. The rest of us got to the ranger station just after 7am, we booked the two to two and a half hour hike with a guide. We were assigned Suleman and Mr Mansoor. As we arrived into the station we saw a couple of dragons lolling in the mud from the low tide. We left the gated enclosure and Suleman told us we would be going slowly as both guides were in the middle of their Ramadan fast, they have nothing pass their lips from sunrise to sunset, and it was already boiling hot. We had gone about 10 minutes through a lovely shaded river bed when we stopped, Suleman is asthmatic and needed to catch his breath. By this stage Ottilie was in tears and desperately wanted to return to the base as she was terrified by the dragons. We persuaded her to go a bit further, we went another 10 minutes up the river and found a lone bull water buffalo wallowing in the river. He looked pretty disinterested but he was big. By this stage Ottilie was howling and claiming that she hates all big animals and needed to go home. We persuaded her we were half way and very safe with our two guides. Well that soon proved wrong as we started climbing we were stopping every 10 mins for Suleman’s asthma, and Mr Mansoor who had lost most of his teeth from old age had disappeared! It was very slow progress that took about another hour to get to the top of the hill, just as Suleman was apologising for seeing no dragons, out popped Mr Mansoor, who had been on a hunt for the dragons who said there were non about, we told him it really did not matter. Literally 2 minutes later Ottilie screams out that a dragon is next to the tree and there was an enormous one! Poor Ottilie was even more distraught at this stage and we were nearly 2 hours into the walk. She asked Suleman how much longer to which he responded we were nearly half way! That was definitely the wrong answer, but we told her there was no point in turning back. We finally headed down and got to the stream that after all this rain has widened into a huge basin of thick mud. Suleman and Mr Mansoor took us back and forth trying to find us a suitable crossing, giving up we had to go back inland. I wondered when they had last done the adventure hike! It seemed that because of all the rain and the low tourist season the place is totally overgrown. There were a lot of thorn trees that are looking invasive, so there was a lot of skirting around the scratchy thorns. Finally Mr Mansoor found some bits of wood and made us a crossing, we were on a very narrow edge of the water when Ottilie yells out there is a dragon coming for us! She was right even Suleman told us all to get away quickly which got all of hearts pounding. It was so funny because he had been so nonchalant about all the other dragons, greeting them and offering to take photos with us, so I can only think he was a bit concerned because it was running! We were on this narrow edge of the muddy water so we were in single file which meant we had to go one at a time. Luckily by the time the adrenalin had kicked in with us and we had put some distance between us and the dragon, it appeared to lose interest. We staggered back into the base 4 hours later, with Suleman wheezing and not even able to have a drink of water during his fast. We were dripping sweat and downed ice cold drinks from the small cafe, feeling rather guilty about poor Suleman and Mr Mansoor. The museum lights were not working so we did a whip through with our phone torches and then returned to the boat. Rowan collected us and brought a couple of old asthma pumps for Suleman, I hope that he uses them properly poor guy, he was extremely grateful.

No sooner were we back on board than we picked up anchor so that we had enough time to get to our next destination which was the remote beach on Rinka where we had seen the dragons with Lovat and family. We got to a narrowish channel where the current gets strong and Rowan tried to put the second engine on and nothing happened. He tried many times with no luck, so had to go through with just the one engine. At least we knew the anchorage, there was not another boat in sight it was no problem getting the anchor down with plenty of space around us. Once we were all settled, Rowan tried to get the engine going with the help of ChatGPT and others but nothing worked. We had a very peaceful evening and had to rethink our plans. There is a big weather system coming in again with 40 knot winds predicted for Thursday. The Crickmore’s leave on Friday but we will not be able to risk going back on Thursday which means returning on Wednesday. However we will have to get the engine fixed, we made the decision to return to LBJ first thing tomorrow and thanks to Noah’s friend Max we have a mechanic coming to help us get the engine sorted.