Flores trip: Day 7

We left the hotel around 6am, our flight was at 7am and there was already quite a long queue when we arrived at the airport. We queued up for check in and somehow it was a bit chaotic. After a while we just realized that everything's done manually (including the manual weight meter for our luggage). They wanted to issue a new ticket for us (did not really get it at that time why we had to get a new one). There were three persons behind the desks busy writing the new tickets and the boarding passes. Basically we showed the officer our tickets and his colleague weighed our luggage and gave them tags. Then we had to wait until he called our names and gave us our new tickets and the boarding passes. At that time we realized that we got a bonus transit to Kupang, in west Timor which is actually in the opposite direction to Denpasar. They said that was because the flight to Kupang the previous day was canceled. I was still thinking positive about it, giving me another island to step on..that's quite a bonus :-P... though a bit worried for Runi since she had her connecting flight at noon to Balikpapan.


Everything's okay, we landed at El Tari airport in Kupang and I thought that we only dropped the people that originally wanted to fly to Kupang. But they asked us to leave the plane. I was still excited, yee another island for this trip. When we reached the arrival area, I saw there were several officers surrounded by some passengers. There I heard that our flight to Denpasar would be at 3pm, which was like more than six hours transit time in Kupang. After making sure what I heard (yeah 3pm) I also knew that actually the plane that brought us from Maumere still continued the flight to Surabaya (or Jakarta) via Denpasar. I did not really get that actually, what I knew was they still flew to Denpasar but not with us (the people who just flew from Maumere). Runi was a bit panicked and she decided if she could get a ticket to Jakarta, she would fly there to get another connecting flight to Balikpapan since there are more options to fly from Jakarta than Denpasar. Ole and I just waited for Runi to get the solution for her problem (the one that I regret later on since I should have fought for the flight ticket to Denpasar that morning), we still confused what to do for the next six hours stranded in Kupang. When finally we met Runi, she got the ticket to Denpasar that would depart immediately without having to pay anything. That was the time when I felt that we did a mistake to just given up flying to Denpasar with the morning flight, we should have made up a connecting flight that we had to catch...but anyway, the idea was too late, all the seat were taken already.

So to make the story shorter, we decided to enjoy Kupang a bit. Getting the info from Lonely Planet, we decided to visit the museum. The airport is a quite far away from the city center and the taxi costs us 60K rupiahs...we decided to use angkot, a typical public transportation in Indonesia in the form of a small minibus. It has been quite a while for me to use angkot... when was the last time... I could not remember it anymore :-P


The museum visit was quite great , glad that we decided to do it. We had a guide who explained almost all the things that were displayed in the museum. It displays some traditional clothes from different areas in East Nusa Tenggara (Kupang is the capital of East Nusa Tenggara), which is very interesting. I learnt several types of traditional sarongs and recognized the differences among them (songket, ikat, sutis, the three types of the traditional sarongs in East Nusa Tenggara). We also saw the skull of the famous Flores hobbit there. Somehow the museum visit made our Flores trip complete..

We returned back to the airport using angkot and ojek (a motorbike taxi), then finally we left Kupang for Denpasar, ending our Flores trip from the capital city of its province. It was really a nice experience, Flores is beautiful with its people, culture and nature (miss the long winding road with White lion's and Bon Jovi's songs as soundtrack :-P) . We have not visited all the interesting places there...so there's always a reason to visit it again :-)

Note: thanks to Ole for the pics on this post.