Public Bus to Bajawa and local market

First of all, I have to say, the most beautiful landscape in Flores is between Labuan Bajo and Ruteng.
It is soooo lush and really a nice journey with the ups and downs along the serpentines.
If you can, rent a car and drive by yourselb from Labuan Bajo til Ruteng and enjoy this very natural paradise.

With a public bus is the situation a totally different one. If you stay near the main road in Labuan Bajo then be on the alert, the pick-up arrives sometimes in front of 6am. On the way I had a lot of stops. It starts with an complete check of the bus. Don`t know, why the did this not the evening before......

The complete journey takes from 6-3pm and we had one hour breack for lunch. This lunch was included in the ticket price and this was 100000Rp.

It was a maxi bus with 21 seats, but at the end of the travel it was very tight. It seems that a lot of people used this kind of bus for the short term transport from the suburbs of Bajawa getting there.That sounds like Bajawa is a big city, but it isn`t and it was such a long drive from the southern coast line of Flores uphil the serpentines til Bajawa. It was also a very cool temperature at this town and I was happy to have a hot shower in the room.

Finally arrived in Bajawa I met a few other guys on the trip. One women of Argentina, one man also from Argentina and one guy of Italy.

I decided to take an ojek (motobike-taxi) for 5000Rp for getting into the town to my selected hotel. The other guys followed me to this adress and it was a shame to see how they try to bargain about 83 €-Cent!!!
Espacially the argentinian woman was higgling about every cent.

Anyway I decided to stay at the Happy Happy Guesthouse, which was very new and owned by a guy of the Netherlands and an Indonesian. I took a single room for 150000Rp including breakfast, what was very expensive for Indonesia.
But in fact, as far as you travel to the East of Indonesia, everything will be more expensive then in Java or Bali. They told us always it is because of the long way of transport by ship everything to the further locations......but I can`t believe this. Every Island has an harbor and what sense does it make to import all the goods first to Java and then further to the other Islands? Anyway, I don`t know exactly what the reason for this uprising prices are.......

First I arranged a meeting with woman of Finnland, which I met at the Gardena Hotel in Labuan Bajo. So we dated her at the market later this evening.

We visited the local market and the locals in Bajawa where very friendly, so we enjoyed the time on the market and tried different fruits. I asked a young local guy to translate, because I didn`t understand the explanation the saleswoman told us. That guy was a young student and he followed us and showed us also the biggest supermarket in Bajawa. In this supermarket is a counter and you have to tell the salesman what you want and then they pick it up and bring it to the counter where you also have to pay......strange.......
Do they have so much thievings, or is the owner a generous guy who want to give more employers a work?

Finally I found a food stall on the street with Martabak, the delicious food I knew from Lombok. It is so yummy, although they prepared it here without sausage inside and also without chilli-sauce. Anyway it was delicous and the others enjoyed that so much, that we ordered two more of this fantastic food.

Unfortunately I wasn`t able to explain this guys at the foodstall my suggestions to preparen the food next time with sausage. May be they didn`t want to change their recipe.....

We participate while our dinner from a firework near beside and nobody takes care about the road in front of us, til we heard a very loud conversation between a motobike driver and driver of a new looking black SUV. They had a very heavy discussion about the question of guilt and so it comes that they called the police.
The police didn`t talk very much, they just took along the motobike and took it with them.

Our nice translator told us, that the motobike driver is already well known at the police and that he is often drunken. Yeah, so it works in Indonesia......there is not a long discussion with the police........