an island where the road is the itinerary
Reserve fourteen nights on Flores, eastern Indonesia, moving west to east by road
People who ask us for Bali usually describe something that Flores still does without effort: a warm island, a road that climbs, and a room that costs less than the flight to reach it. You can reserve fourteen nights here, ending at a crater lake that changes color on its own schedule.
Fourteen nights, from $4,430 per person.
When somebody calls this office and says Bali, they are almost never describing the whole island. They are describing four or five specific images: a green stepped valley seen from above, a warm sea the temperature of a bath, a room with a roof made of something organic, dinner for eight dollars, and the sense that the flight was long enough to have properly left home. Those are reasonable things to want. Every one of them is real and still available in Indonesia.
The trouble is geography rather than the island's character. Most rooms sold to first time visitors sit in the strip running from the airport up through Kuta, Seminyak and Canggu, and that strip has been absorbing new construction faster than it has been laying road. The valley in the photograph is near Ubud. The temple on the water is up the west coast. The volcano is in the northeast. From a room in the south, each of those is a day, and the day is spent mostly in the back of a car at fifteen miles an hour behind scooters. We have had people come back describing a two week holiday in which they saw four places and spent thirty hours travelling between them.
Flores is what those same people usually meant. It is the next long island east, close enough that the flight is ninety minutes, far enough that nothing about it has been built for volume. There is one road across it. Everything worth stopping for is on that road or a short turning off it, and the road itself is the reason to go rather than the tax you pay to arrive somewhere.
What people ask for
Bali
Bali earns its reputation honestly: the food is superb and cheap, the interior around Ubud and the north coast remain genuinely beautiful, the island is easy to enter, and almost nobody who goes there regrets having gone.
We do not arrange Bali because the south of the island is now a traffic problem with a coastline, and the beaches, terraces and temples in the photographs sit ninety minutes to two hours by car from the rooms most people are offered.
What this desk will reserve instead
Fourteen nights on Flores
An island where the road is the itinerary.
Fourteen nights, from $4,430 per person. Send a booking request
How far this sits from the request: a different week, or the country next door
Fourteen nights, nine beds, moving west to east by hired car with a local driver across roughly 420 miles of mountain road; bags travel in the car and are carried into each room, so nothing is hauled between towns on your back.
Flores is a 90 minute flight east of Bali, landing at Labuan Bajo on the west end. The road east is paved but constantly turning: 420 miles takes eight days because the average is under 25 miles an hour. Beds are family run guesthouses and two small hotels, all with private bathrooms, four with hot water only in the evening. The dry months run April into October, with June through September the steadiest on record. Fourteen nights, from $4,430 per person.
Thirteen nights in the nine listed rooms plus one night in a simple room near the eastern airport; the hired car and driver for eight travel days including his fuel, meals and lodging; airport pickup at Labuan Bajo and drop off at Maumere; breakfast every morning; one boat day among the western islands with lunch aboard; entry to the crater lake park and the two weaving villages; bottled water in the car throughout; a written day by day plan with the driver's name and phone number.
International and domestic flights, including the Bali to Labuan Bajo leg at roughly $70 to $140 each way; lunches and dinners outside the boat day, realistically $6 to $14 a person a day; the crater lake sunrise permit at 150,000 rupiah per person if you go on a Sunday or a national holiday rather than a weekday; the driver's tip, customarily around $8 to $12 a day from the pair of you; laundry at about $2 a kilo; anything you buy in the weaving villages, where a good ikat cloth is $60 to $400 and haggling is expected; medical evacuation cover, which we do not sell and do not advise on; alcohol, which is expensive and irregularly stocked east of Bajo.
Do not reserve this if you cannot tolerate long days in a car on switchbacks: four of the eight driving days run six to eight hours with maybe twenty minutes of straight road in each. The crater lake means a 3:45 a.m. start and a 30 minute walk up loose gravel steps in the dark, gaining about 400 feet. Two of the guesthouses have no elevator and rooms on the second floor. If motion sickness is a real problem for you, or if stairs and uneven ground are, this trip will be endured rather than enjoyed.
The road east, and what it does to a day
The single highway across Flores is often called the Trans Flores. It is paved for nearly its whole length now, and that is not the point. The point is that the island is a spine of volcanoes and the road goes over them rather than around, so a distance that looks like a two hour drive on a map is six hours in fact. Between Bajo and Ruteng the road gains about 3,600 feet, loses most of it, and gains it again. You will average somewhere under 25 miles an hour for the entire crossing. That number governs the whole trip and it is why we build fourteen nights rather than ten.
What the slowness buys is the part people remember. You stop where you want. Nine days out of fourteen, you will be out of the car at least three times for something nobody planned: a market laying out fish at the roadside, a school letting out, a stretch of coast on the north side where the sand is genuinely black and there is nobody on it. The driver knows the road and will tell you when a stop is worth it, and mostly he will be right.
Season is worth stating carefully, because a season is a record of what has happened and not an assurance about what will. The dry months on Flores have historically run from April into October. June, July, August and September have been the steadiest across recent years, with most days clear by mid morning and afternoon cloud building over the interior. January and February have been the wettest, and in those months the road east of Bajo has closed for landslides on more than one occasion. We do not sell this trip between mid December and March.
The kind of traveler this suits
This works for people who like being on the move and do not need the destination to justify the journey. If you are content to spend a morning in a car watching an island go past, stop for coffee grown four miles away, and arrive somewhere small in the afternoon, you will have a very good two weeks. It also suits people traveling as a pair who want long stretches of conversation, because that is what the car provides.
It suits less well anyone whose holiday is measured in swimming. There is good water on Flores, especially in the west around the islands off Bajo, but the middle of the island is mountains and the coast on the north is often steep and rough. If two weeks without a real beach day sounds like a loss, say so when you write in and we will restructure the eastern half or point you at a different island entirely.
The year as it has run
The road dries out and the interior turns from saturated green to something lighter. Rooms are easy to get. Afternoon rain still arrives perhaps one day in three, usually after four o'clock.
Reliably good and noticeably empty. The crater lake has been clear at dawn on most mornings in this month. Sea in the west is calm enough for the boat day nearly every day.
The steadiest stretch on record and the busiest, though busy on Flores means a dozen other foreigners in a town. Nights in Ruteng and around the lake drop to the mid fifties Fahrenheit and you will want a fleece.
Our own preference. The dust has not yet gone but the crowd has thinned, water in the west is still flat, and rooms that were held in July are open again.
The turn. Some years it stays dry the whole month, other years the first real rain arrives in the second week. Everything green again by the end of it.
Rain becomes ordinary rather than occasional. The lake is often in cloud at sunrise, which is the one thing on this trip that cannot be rescheduled once you are there.
Wet, and the mountain road is unreliable. We do not run the crossing in these months and will say so rather than sell you a version that spends four days indoors.
What people find out too late about this one
The car is the trip, and the car is also the thing people underestimate. Eight travel days out of fourteen, four of them long, in a vehicle on a road that turns constantly. Some people sleep through it happily. Some people are unwell by the second hour of the first day and stay quietly miserable for the rest of the fortnight. There is no gentler version: the mountains are where they are and the road does what it does. If anyone in the party gets carsick on ordinary roads at home, tell us at the request stage and we will say honestly whether we think this is the wrong trip for you. We would rather lose the reservation than have you spend $4,430 being ill in a car.
The other thing is standards. The nine rooms are clean, private and run by families who take genuine pride in them, and they are not hotels in the way the word is used in Bali's south. Hot water in four of them runs in the evening only. Wifi exists in seven and is slow in all seven. Two of the eastern towns lose power for an hour or two most weeks. Nobody on the staff will speak much English beyond the practical, which is part of why the island is still like this. If you need a reliable connection for work, this is a poor fourteen nights and you should not reserve it.
One correction we make often: the western islands off Labuan Bajo are extraordinary and the boat day is included, but a single day is what we build. Longer live aboard arrangements involve overnight boats we have no way to inspect ourselves, and this office does not place reservations it cannot stand behind. If the boats are the reason you are going, we are not the right desk for it and will tell you so plainly rather than take the request.
Send this desk a booking request
This form is open 24/7 and takes booking requests at any hour. It asks for no card number and no payment, because nothing is ever paid to this office. Requests are read in the order they arrive and answered within one business day.
No card number is asked for on this page or held anywhere by this office, and sending this costs nothing and commits you to nothing. A request is not a reservation: nothing is held in your name until the operating company confirms it in writing and you have read its terms.