The decision to go to Flores was quite a spontaneous last minute spur of emotion as a dear friend I had recently made in Java invited me to join her on the last two days of her trip across Flores. It didn’t take me long to make up my mind and as I was sitting on the stairs of my homestay in Canggu, disappointed that such a popular place in Bali could be so westernized, unauthentic and overpriced, I went onto Skyscanner and instantaneously booked my flight from Denpasar to Labuan Bajo, the base town for the Komodo national park on the north of the island.
After a couple of days in Labuan Bajo and an epic adventure across the ocean to see if the Komodo dragons really are that scary and lazy 😀 , I was ready to take the unbeaten path and go in search of the island’s most popular traditional village aka Wae Rebo.
Traditional villages are believed to be the only places where indigenous people could still be found living in the same houses, growing the same crops, surviving in the same way they have been years and years ago. I was fascinated by the sheer idea of talking to someone with life so unbelievably and quite remarkably distant from the kinda life we live in the west. I had no idea what I was gonna find, who I was gonna meet and how well or badly I would be received by these people.
Having seen how genuine and helpful the majority of the Indonesians I had already crossed paths with have been, I wasn’t prepared even the slightest for what was coming!
In Labuan Bajo apart from the popular Komodo tour, locals were eagerly selling overpriced group packages to visit Wae Rebo, the only traditional village which as I was gonna find shortly afterward, to have been hit by the tourism in the most unimaginable way possible. As local salesmen were shouting after me “Wae Rebo, Miss, Wae Rebo”, I knew I had to cross this place off my list but God damn it, I was curious. What was so special about this place that locals were pushing so hard on it? Was it just another scam I had to stay away from?
Whether I was gonna go to Wae Rebo or not, the one thing I was 100% set on was that I would definitely not go on a group tour but will do it on my own terms.
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How to get to Wae Rebo
To explore Flores on your own (especially the ladies) requires some big, agile, hard to break balls 😀 And I mean it! Outside of the main tourist spots, i.e. Labuan Bajo (for Komodo) and Ende/ Moni (for Kelimutu), it’s as common to see another tourist as it is to see a Komodo dragon during hunting hours standing in front of carrion and not going absolutely nuts to shred it to pieces LOL ! I think you get the picture.
But nonetheless, on the night before my friend was meant to leave the island, I bumped into a local who had a 7-seater car and was offering a lift to people to different points on the island south of Labuan Bajo. Ruteng and Bajawa were the most common as they were the closest larger towns.
So after quite a bit of haggling on the price, I arranged for this same guy to pick me up from my homestay the following morning and drop me off at Ruteng, for about 80k IDR for what was gonna be roughly a 5-hour trip.
Finding someone to drive you from Labuan Bajo to Ruteng is as easy as finding rice on a local warung’s menu but depending on the season (and the number of tourists at the time), you might have to haggle more fiercely to push the price down to something more reasonable.
When I got to Ruteng I was pleased when a lovely girl welcomed me at my hostel, giving me the warmest “Good evening, miss Marchela” I had heard in days. I was actually quite shocked both by her friendliness but also her formality. I had not been addressed as Miss Marchela by anyone quite evidently much younger than me so it kinda stuck with me.
After a bit of small talk, I had to make the most out of my host’s hospitality, as you do in a place where barely anyone speaks English, so I got right to the point “How can I get to Wae Rebo?” – I asked.
She thought I was crazy 😀 ! From Ruteng I wanted to rent a scooter and drive all the way to the base for Wae Rebo not having a single clue what the road was, whether there was even A road, how long it would take to drive there. I was gonna have to go through some pretty minor streets and in all honesty, I was pretty convinced there won’t even be any asphalt. But I didn’t care 😀 If it could be done, I was gonna do it! So early the next day the girl from my hostel had arranged for me to pick up a scooter from a place just a few blocks up the street so I can hit the road for my mad 3-hour drive in a quest to find Wae Robe.
My plan was kinda crazy but also wildly exciting, some would say completely unrealistic! I wanted to start as soon as I pick up the scooter at around 7am, drive to Denge, which is the base town for the Wae Rebo hike, do the hike for 2 hours up and 2 hours down and then drive back to Ruteng the same day. I know what you’re thinking at this point? This gal is maaaaaad! I am now and I sure was back then 😀
Scootering to Denge
Sometimes I honestly think that I have luck that I need to protect as if it was the only thing I have left to fall back on. I must admit that I wasn’t worried about the drive at all but the thought of going into the jungle and do the trek completely on my own was secretly giving me goosebumps. It does take a quite bit to scare me off but at that point I had heard way too many horror stories about leeches and terrifying encounters with snakes which were making my heart heavy even by the mere thought of a possible encounter. Call me a chicken but when my host told me that there was a Dutch girl in the hostel (one of a handful of people staying there that night), I knew I had to convince her to join me. There was no other way I would cross the jungle on my own when the likelihood of seeing other tourists en-route was as slim as the chance of going to Indonesia in the middle of the rainy season and not get even a single drop of rain.
Call me insanely lucky but never in the wildest scenarios going through my head that night did I ever think that I would meet Malou that day – one of my dearest friends now and a gal so crazy you would think we’re adventure sisters or something. So she was IN! And this is how we embarked on the bumpiest, scariest, most scenic and most asphalt deplete drive I ever did during my 3 months in Southeast Asia.
We would drive for miles and miles on end, jumping from hole to hole, going from left to right in our desperate efforts to decide which of the many bumps to give the pleasure of bruising our bums 😀 Big trucks loaded with rice, supplies, and people were going past, equally swaying from left to right, just like we were, making driving with more than 20km/h unimaginable and absolutely reckless. It was taking us way longer than the anticipated 2.5 hours but the scenery everywhere around us was so stunning that we couldn’t simply drive past and not stop for a photo. So we did, a number of times.
We made the occasional stop for fuel and snacks, both sold by local ladies on the side of the road. I remember spinning my head in all directions trying not to miss a single cow mowing the fields, or rice paddies sucking up the sunshine, or a mountain hill filling up the backdrop. The road was like nothing I had ever seen before. It’s at this point that I knew that whatever Wae Rebo turns out to be, this drive WAS my reason to call this trip UNFORGETTABLE and worth redoing over and over again.
Hiking from Denge to Wae Rebo
After nearly 4 hours of driving, we had eventually made it to Denge. We used Maps.me to direct us to the place, putting “SDK Denge” in the search bar, but when we got there, we found out that actually, we could drive a bit further up before starting the hike. We would take any shortcut at that point, afraid that we might have to drive in the dark or worse yet, sleep in the village.
Just like in any marathon the few hundred meters before the finish line are the most insanely draining, the last 10-minute drive from SDK Denge to the very start of the hike was the most petrifying leg of the trip. It was all muddy, with such massive bumps I thought my scooter would never be able to handle. I was getting stuck in the mud and felt so helpless that I was literally on the brink of tearing up. We had driven for so long on such a shitty road and now THIS?! I just couldn’t take it. I didn’t think the bloody scooter could take it either which was actually what was worrying me the most.
A polite local saw that I was struggling to unstuck my scooter from one of the muddy holes my rotted ready to fall into its piece scooter had landed into and warmly offered to drive it just a few meters up. To this day I don’t think I would have been able to drive the scooter up to the end of the path without this man’s help. Luckily he was there!!
This is how we got to the start of the hiking trail, ready to sweat it all out in search of Wae Rebo. The actual hike was nothing like I thought it would be though. I thought it would be full of tourists squeezing on the narrow hiking path, yet we didn’t see anyone, only the occasional local but even these encounters were less than 5 for sure. I thought it would be roasting hot, yet it was pretty cool, making up for a rather pleasant trek. It was however slippery so at times we had to pause the burning conversation to make sure we’ve got our concentration straight.
We didn’t see any terrifying insects, spiders or the mysterious leeches (thankfully). In fact, it was such a beautiful hike right in the middle of a lush jungle. Yet the actual path to the village was so clear we couldn’t get lost even if we wanted to. After about 2 hours of walking, talking and watching out for snakes falling off the trees 😀 , we had arrived!
Visiting Wae Rebo
It was particularly cloudy when we got to Wae Rebo. Yet, we could clearly see the circular, cone-shaped houses with thatched sides. They looked just like in the photos, simple yet beautiful and unique!
Unfortunately, the only beautiful thing about this place were the houses. We were greeted by a seemingly friendly man who immediately asked us to pay the entrance fee of 250k IDR. I couldn’t quite understand what we were going to pay for. There were no ceremonies happening that day, we didn’t want to sleep in the village which is what most tourists tend to do and obviously pay for. The village was literally about 10 houses, all of which we could see already so we just could not understand what they wanted us to pay this much for.
At that point, we could clearly see that the same man who had just greeted us nicely, had completely turned into the most hostile and angry version of himself. He asked us to leave immediately! We were running out of water and were starving as we expected to have a simple lunch prepared at the village so we politely asked if we can at least have and of course pay for food and water before respectfully leaving the place.
Yet, another vicious “Leave now” was thrown at us and at that point we honestly started to fear that this man was seriously gonna physically make us leave if we didn’t get the hell out of there immediately.
I was shocked, so disappointed and so outraged. I couldn’t believe it. A village called “traditional” was nothing more than a pure money-making, transformed by tourism machine, with a community of people who see dollar signs on the forehead of every single non-local trying to take a few steps further into their “indigenous” circle. It was mad! Kids were playing with a football, had a football pitch and in fact, it didn’t even feel like we’ve come to a traditional village at all. The whole vibe was so mad, I didn’t wanna spend another minute there even if they suddenly decided to let us go in and have a look around. I wanted out and wanted out NOW.
So after no more than 10 minutes, we left Wae Rebo – disappointed, hungry and thirsty and ultimately sad that tourism and money could change a community to the extent and viciousness we had just witnessed.
We headed on the hike down, hopped on our scooters once again and extremely late that same day we made it back to Ruteng. I was so grateful that it all worked out. No one fell off a scooter, no one came back all covered with leeches or beaten up by the “indigenous” people 😀 – just hungry and in a weird way pleased that we had experienced both sides of the trip to Wae Rebo – a stunning unforgettable drive and a thrill-filled hike to the village followed by a “slap in the face” realization when we eventually got there. But before I close this post off, here are a few final pointers.
What to bring with you
- Bring cash. You will not find an ATM anywhere so be prepared. Also, definitely get some food before reaching Wae Rebo (unless you plan on sleeping there in which case I would hope the locals would make some instant noodles for you).
- Wear sturdy proper hiking boots. The trek isn’t the hardest but it is slippery so make sure you have a good grip. Also, make sure you can run fast in them in case you refuse to pay at the village and start getting chased after 😀
- Bring lots of water. I had the unrealistic expectation that there would be a lot of warungs and little kiosks to buy water and food on the way from but there were barely any so prepare for it.
- Don’t forget to download maps.me before you hit the road and bring a portable charger because trust me, you cannot be left without your navigation at any one point – I and Malou lost each other on the way back and as it was getting dark, it was also getting scary because my battery was slowly starting to go.
- Smile, smile, and smile! It (usually) goes a long way in Indonesia.
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