Komodo feels like the land that time forgot, with dragons and prehistoric scenery, but in 1990 it was certainly the land that health and safety had never visited.
To get to the island itself meant the main ferry from Flores to Sumbawa stopped in mid-ocean and a small ferry pulled alongside.
As they rocked up and down beside each other you had to throw luggage (my back pack containing everything I owned) and even mountain bikes between the vessels praying they didn’t drop to the bottom of the ocean and then you had to jump between the vessels yourself, with similar prayers.
Once on Komodo we were allowed to sunbathe on the beach and swim in the sea, before anyone mentioned the Komodo Dragons were free to roam anywhere on the island and they were also good swimmers.
One aggressive dragon was banished to nearby Rinca island, but just swam back.
The dragons, the largest of all monitor lizards, can reach up to 70Kg in weight and 3 metres long and can out run a deer from a standing start over a few metres.
Their mouths are so full of bacteria that if bitten it is said you can never get the wound clean.
They are such good predators that they can smell a woman on her period from 3 miles away.
Trevor and I intended to spend a night camping high up on the mountain near Baron von Reding-Biberegg’s monument.
He has a monument to his disappearance as he was wealthy and famous, back in the 1990s it seems that quite a few toursists “disappeared”.
Infact Trevor and I were guided all the way to the “Dragon-proof enclosure” where we were to camp, only to find two dragons inside the enclosure.
Instead of camping we decided to head back to the village – which is on stilts as the dragons don’t do steps well.
For the whole day trekking to and from the campsite, Trevor and our guide Johans had thin stick each as a deterrent to the dragons, the sort of thing you would catch a grass snake with, hardly any defence at all, but then I only had the camera!
Having let us spend a day in ridiculously close proximity to these predators, the next day we went to a “feeding” where a freshly slaughtered goat was fed to the dragons.
They soon swarmed to the meal. They are unique in the reptile world for group hunting, which does not make them less scary.
They do not have cutting teeth, but clamp their jaws and rip their prey apart.
Seeing the frenzied group dismember the unfortunate goat made you really think about the Baron’s fate.
