Sunday in Flores

sunday morning we woke up and made our way into town to try to go church. there isn't a ward or branch in labuan bajo, but we thought we'd go to catholic service. unfortunately, we missed the service (we got there right as it ended). so we ended up walking around town and figuring out the next step in our vacation adventure. 

 a morning view of the harbor.

 a whale tail!

 some boats getting worked on.

 some boats ready to be used.

 the covered shading is so smart. 

 bottle caps embedded into the ground.

 there was a lively morning market. these carts have fruit.

 but we also saw lots of seafood. 

 i thought this looked really cool. they are strung through the eyes, but if you can look past that (no pun intended), it is pretty cool.

 a tuna cut into bite-size pieces.

 

 the fish not worth selling.

 such beautiful fish. i especially love seeing the red snappers.

 this woman is cutting the fish on the cutting board.

 he's cutting up fish too. although his fish looks messier.

 i love how colorful this picture is. that's one of the coolest things about traditional markets--all of the colors.

 oh the colors!

 i wonder if he's selling the bananas or wanting to eat the bananas.

we walked around downtown to try to figure out what we would do the next day. we thought we might go deep-sea fishing, but it quickly became apparent that there wasn't a good way for us to do that. 

ultimately, we decided we were ready to leave flores. we tried to buy airline tickets back to bali...but we found out that every airline that operates in labuan bajo was completely booked until the following thursday or friday (and even then we'd be flying to bali in two different groups on different airlines). that didn't seem like a good solution to us--so we looked for another option.

 as we were going through town, we found a cute baby for the kids to play with.

 we heard that this place offered ferries to bali, but no one was there to talk to us.

 b and i walked with roland into town to get the tickets that we eventually did decide to buy: a 35-hour ferry and bus trip from labuan bajo to denpasar, bali. it was about $45/person, which was nice. and it would get us to bali by tuesday evening. so we walked back into town to buy those tickets from our new friend.

in the above picture, b is holding up a snake skeleton. i also like how tough roro looks in the background.

 none of us had ever seen a snake skeleton before--definitely a cool find.

 we checked out the night market. there was all sorts of beautiful ikan (fish) and cumi (squid).

 we saw a lot of tourists eating their dinner at the night seafood market. that made us realize that we probably could have done that too. we had already had a nice seafood dinner though--so live and learn.

 i love the indonesian markets.