Komodo Island

After our three days on Bali we caught the Silver Muse, shown below,  and began our 30 day cruise. The Muse holds about 600 passengers so it was a good size ship for us. I can't imagine going on a cruise on one of the really huge ships that are sailing these days. The largest ship sailing in 2019 is The Symphony of the Seas - almost 7,000 passengers and over 2,000 crew members. Not for us!

The first stop was the Island of Komodo which only claim to fame is the komodo dragons who live there.

The map below shows we haven't gone very far.

Our ship was anchored quite a way off shore as seen in this photo.

These young peckers came out in a small boat and begged for money. They circled our ship screaming "money, money, money" and some of us threw down some small bills.

I see they have life jackets hanging on a hook but no one wearing one.

So they took us in small groups (maybe 30 people per group) through the jungle to find the dragons.  Of course they're letting on that they don't know where they are and we could be attacked at any time so stick together, yadda yadda yadda...

And the guy below, one of the park rangers, was going to fight of the dragons with his special stick if need be.

After 45 minutes or so we come to a clearing where there's a few of them hanging around a water hole.

They certainly look menacing.

This poor little guy is what they like to eat.  We never saw any dragons feeding though and I suspect the park rangers bring food to them.

Everybody wanted to get their picture taken with them and we did too - but at at good distance.

The water hole, we found out, was fed by a pipe buried in the ground and one of our fellow passengers said that one of the park rangers had told him that the dragons were all drugged to make sure they didn't attack someone.  They were all pretty lethargic so I'm inclined to believe it.

Anyway, they were pretty cool to see close up.

Another bucket list item checked off!

That's it for Komodo Island - off tro Darwin, Australia tonight.