10. How We Designed Flores: East to West

The Problem With Flores

Flores is one of those destinations that looks easy on paper and is anything but in practice. The island is 360 kilometres long, with a spine of volcanoes running its entire length and a road network that has only recently been upgraded to the point where overland travel is reliable. Most visitors arrive in Labuan Bajo in the west, see Komodo, and leave. The rest of the island — which contains, in my view, the most interesting material — is largely unknown.
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When I first proposed a crossing of Flores, west to east, my initial research took three months. I drove the route twice, stayed in every guesthouse that was worth considering, ate in every market, and mapped every guide and cultural practitioner I wanted to involve. The journey you see in our programme is not the journey I first imagined. It is the journey that emerged from that process of revision.
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The Direction Decision: East to West

The first major design decision was direction. Most people who attempt an island crossing start in Labuan Bajo and move east. I reversed it, and the reason is practical as much as aesthetic: Kelimutu, the tri-coloured crater lakes in the east, need to be seen at dawn. If you approach from the west, you arrive at Kelimutu after days of increasingly intense cultural experience — the highlands, the textile villages, the Ngada megaliths — which means you are already attuned to the island's depth when you reach the thing that looks most spectacular. You read it differently.
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Starting in the east also means you finish in Labuan Bajo, which has better international connections and functions more comfortably as a departure point. The logistics aligned with the narrative logic. That alignment, when it happens, is the clearest signal that a route is right.
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The Relationships That Make It Work

The guides who work this route for us are not hired on a per-journey basis. I have relationships with them that go back years. Petrus, who leads the Kelimutu ascent and the Wolowaru textile village visit, is a former anthropology teacher who left academia to return to his home village. His knowledge of Flores ikat traditions is not touristic; it is scholarly. He reads the cloths the way a literary critic reads a text.

In Bajawa, we work with a family guesthouse rather than a hotel. The owners — two sisters and their mother — prepare meals from their own garden and introduce guests to the market on Tuesday mornings. This is not a programme element I invented. It emerged from a conversation three years ago in which the older sister mentioned, almost as an aside, that the market was the best way to understand what the highlands actually eat. She was right.
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What We Leave Out, and Why

Every journey design involves decisions about what not to include. Flores has many things that are photographically compelling but contextually thin — specific viewpoints, certain waterfalls, a beach or two that appears in every travel magazine coverage of the island. I leave most of these out. Not because they're not beautiful, but because beauty without depth doesn't serve the kind of traveller we work with.

The Komodo component stays, but it's a half-day, not two days. The dragons are extraordinary animals; an afternoon is enough. The extra day that most itineraries spend there is better used on the boat crossing to Rinca, which is quieter, and in the water off Pink Beach, which has some of the best shallow snorkelling in the region.
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What We're Still Getting Right

The Flores route has been running for two years now. It improves every time. Last year we added a lunch stop in the mountain village of Colol, between Ruteng and Labuan Bajo, where a woman named Yuliana has started receiving travellers in her home for meals. The food she cooks — based on what's growing in her garden that week — is unlike anything available in a restaurant. We added that stop because a guest mentioned it, having wandered in on their own. This is how a journey gets better: not through planning alone, but through the intelligence of the people who travel it. www.google.com