the bus Shuttle from flores was 8 hours long. our first destination was lanquin from there we drove another 40 min with the pick up to Hotel utopia in the middle of nowhere. Mike an american we met in flores recomanded his volunteering place and we went there together. If you are an alternative veggie hippie you will love this place!
an alternative experience in the nature, with very noisy and big insects. sometimes these stupid Animals were so loud that i had to close my ears with my fingers... our vegetarian dinner was every evening at 7 and the crazy animals liked to crash on the tables, always with the reaction of screaming and escaping girls. the only possibility to get rid of them was to catch them with two fingers or hands and set them out again. a funny fact, If you shake that alienlike animals in your hands they make the terrible sound! maybe they are called cikates..?
at the first day in utopia we used the more or less free tubes and went tubing. we went down a small trail next to the river around 15 minutes and had a very slow and relaxed tube ride. we did that two times through the very beautiful surounding big djungle Mountains. Amy and Daniel tried to stand up on the tube with almost no succes :-( the small rapids are coming every 10 min in the river are a little bit exciting it was a nice relaxing day with an end around the fire at the Hotel own fire spot. Mike played the guitar and entertained us pretty good.
the second day was much more exciting because we did the cave Tour. the Tour started with the cave. a cave mean a dark Tunnel with a very slow flowing river inside. it was very dark and we had only a candle as light. it was wet and slippery aswell and somtimes the water was too deep to walk that we had to swim with the candle. we climbed up and down on unsafe ladders and through pretty small holes and tunnels. at the end of the cave was a small pool even big enough to jump in. we had to climb up to maybe 8 meters height and jumped off into the small hole of 2,5 m diameter. no it wasn't dangerous and the following big swing wasn't that too. it was like the rope swing in flores but much bigger and a real swing with two ropes. two massive steel hosts sticking 15 m straight to the sky. the jump off was in a height of approximately 10 meters, they told us "once you are on the swing there is no coming back we have to jump because otherwise we will hit the hosts on the way back", saftey first! but it was fun If you jumped off a little bit controlled to prevent a belly flop someone did very painful... the next stop was the 12m bridge where dan, Chloe and i jumped off, followed by a very local fried chicken lunch. after that we all went with the pick up to a near by national parc or river Ressort. we hiked about a half an hour straight up to a amazing viewing point. we saw the beautiful river with a lot of pools like steps in it, pretty good. the way down wasn't really exhausting compared to the way up. the water was clear and the pools are big enough to swim in. we slided down from one step to the other on the rocks like natural slides and explored a small under the rock aIR space. at least we went back to our Hotel on the river with a big tubing group. wow what a very full and exciting day!
