Labuan Bajo, Kanawa and Komodo National Park

We flew out of the itty bitty Alor airport and took a stop in Kupang, as we did before. Since there were no connecting flights to Labuan Bajo on the same day we had to to stay a night in Kupang.
We headed straight to the airport early the next morning and headed for Labuan Bajo with SkyAviation. I was pleasantly surprised to see how Labuan Bajo has cleaned itself up. Before, Labuan Bajo was a dirty, dusty, rather dank little town. Now they have paved the roads, cleaned up some garbage and added some nice little restaurants and shops. When we got to Labuan Bajo we grabbed some snacks and caught the boat to Kanawa Island right away.
Kanawa is a gorgeous island about an hour boat ride away from Labuan Bajo and is just barely outside of Komodo National Park. We stayed at Kanawa three years ago so we were eager to come back and see what it's like now.

Last time we were here there was an absolutely spectacular house reef for snorkelling. We were upset to hear there was a very bad storm in January that took out the jetty and damaged some of the reef. I was far more than upset when I hopped in the water-I was depressed, devastated and torn. The reef to the right of the jetty was thriving, vibrant and life-like before, but it's nothing near like that now. Huge toppled over coral heads scatter the ground and the odd fish moped by. I felt like I ought to cry, life has been ripped out by the roots and will take generations to recover. Coral takes it's time to grow so I can't imagine it will be anywhere near back to its original state within my lifetime. I was happily surprised to see that the coral on the left side was quite intact and lively. Although it wasn't nearly as vibrant as the right side prior to the storm. It's still very nice to know the reef wasn't completely annihilated.
Since there is only one restaurant on the island you eat are rather obliged to eat there. The food has gone up in price a fair bit since 2010 but it has gone up in quality a lot too. They hired a new chef and the food is just amazing. We stayed for 6 days and I didn't have a sub par meal the whole time.
Although Komodo is most famous for spotting the Komodo dragons, it's fame also comes from the world class diving. Our first dive was at Tatawa Besar. The highlight of this dive was the blue polka dotted, fluttery nudibranch that I have never seen before. We also got to see some turtles, a leaf scorpionfish and nudibranch eggs (my dad thought it was a fake flower). Our good luck continued onto the next dive- Karang Makassar, where we saw 3 manta rays!!! "Check"...there goes another one off my bucket list! The first one was sooo amazing, we all knelt on the bottom while the manta circled around in front of us and got cleaned by his cleaner fish. Once he came right over top of us, about a foot away from our heads. We saw two more later on in the dive but they were a bit further away. We also got to see a huge whiptail ray stirring up the sand looking for dinner. The best part about the mantas was that they were in the wild (not a zoo or aquarium) and it didn't feel like we harassing them (they were perfectly content with us there and it was their choice to come close to us and investigate). The next day we did a dive on the Kanawa house reef. I was pretty stoked on our frogfish find, it was so weird looking but it was amazing, I never would of known it was a fish if our divemaster didn't point it out. Some other cool sights were turtles, cuttlefish, pipefish and a HUGE bumphead parrotfish. The following day we did two more dives one at Cauldron and the other at Gili Lava Laut. Cauldron had amazing topography, with a huge sandy bowl/cauldron in the centre of the dive site, surrounded by coral reefs/gardens. At one part of the dive you could look up and see schools of fusiliers and trevally. And at another we saw 11 devil rays trying to swim against the current. In the sandy part at the bottom there were hundreds if not thousands of garden eels sticking their heads up and catching food that happens to float in their direction. Gili Lava Laut was our final dive in Komodo. It was a good farewell dive because we got to see 5 turtles! There was also lots of nice soft corals, even ones that swayed back and forth and looked liked hands trying to grasp a hold.

One afternoon when we weren't diving my mom and I decided to hike up to the top of Kanawa Island to get a good view. The hike wasn't very long (about 20 min.) but the view of the island and of the park was great. We sat up and ate some peanuts before we got shooed by a pile of ants. We got a couple peanut shells with 4 peanuts inside, still not quite as good as when we got a peanut shell with money inside last time we were in Indonesia.

We had to leave two days before we planned to because I woke up with a high fever. As much as I love Kanawa, I think it must be cursed! Last time we were here (in 2010) we had to leave early because my dad got a kidney stone. We changed our flight tickets and got ready to go back to Bali so I can rest in an aircon room and hopefully get rid of my fever.