Thar Be Dragons -- Komodo Dragons

After a nice few days restocking in Labuan Bajo we headed out to the Komodo National Park. This is the home of the famed Komodo Dragons. We anchored on Rinca Island (aka Rinca or Rincja) and got ourselves setup to go into the range station for a 07:00 tour. Early morning is best time to see the dragons actually moving around as well as to avoid the tourist herd. This is large male. about 80 kg (175 lbs). They'e actually monitor lizards on steroids, but the early European visitors thought they were dragons...

Now there's no way we would have gotten anywhere near as close to this beast without Ranger Rick standing by. The rangers gather their walking tour group and then grab one of these sticks. The sticks are used to convince the wayward dragons to stand back. We only had 4 people, us and our friends from Fairwinds, on our walk, which made it really nice.

The island has deer, water buffalo and pigs. So you might guess what the dragons eat. The komodos  look slow, but are fast enough to bite the deer and water buffalo. The saliva in their bite has deadly bacteria. A bitten deer will die in about a week, then to be consumed by the komodo.

The island also has these megapode birds. They scrape away with their big feet and make a large nest for their eggs. The female komodos then come along and take over the nest, dig it deeper and lay their eggs there for a 9 month gestation. The Komodo mommies also then dig holes for nests around the real one as diversions to predators.

Once they've had their morning breakfast they don't mind posing.

We took the trail to the top of the hills and got this nice view of the anchorage. The anchorage is pretty mellow in the morning. The afternoon is just a zoo of tour boats (more on his later)

This guy was blocking the trail on the way to the top of the hill. If you look close you can see some dings in his side where he was battling with another dragon.

This tree was about a half a foot off the trail. Our guide pointed out this aptly named green pit viper. At first no one saw it till we looked closely through the green leaves. And yes, it is deadly venomous. It is poised to strike any frogs or bugs walking down the tree trunk.

The dock greeter. Actually a long-tailed macaque monkey. These guys are all over the island and are pretty skittish. This comes in handy when a komodo lizard is trying to eat you or an Indonesian local is shooing you away.
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Cruisers Notes:
We anchored in Loh Buaya, Rinca at 8º 39.174' S  -  119º 42.816' E in 47ft.
This is too close to the crazy anchoring drills that happen in the afternoon. You really should be back in deeper water away from the tour boats.

The upper picture is where one of the tour boats anchored in front of our friends on Fair Winds. Fair Winds just got an expensive new paint job in Australia, so they try and stay out of the crowd. The second picture is the same boat after they dragged back in the afternoon wind. In response to Fair Winds getting out all their fenders and getting angry with the boat for not moving away, the chef on the boat brought up some cooked banana desserts to appease. It's an Indonesian thing.

Here's the toy anchor they used. The bend at the bottom is just a pipe bent, with no flukes on the end. No wonder it drags.

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Been out of Internet connectivity for a bit and just catching up on the world news.