Bajawa
"The coffee here grows at altitude and tastes of something you can't quite name — the soil, maybe, or the altitude, or the fact that no one is rushing."
Bajawa sits at roughly a thousand meters and the air is cool enough in the evenings to need a jacket, which feels like a small miracle after the coast. I checked into a guesthouse run by a family whose father had a coffee plantation up toward the slopes of Gunung Inerie, and on my first morning he poured me a cup of black Arabica that was so clean and so distinctly floral that I made him pour me another before I had finished the first. He laughed. He had seen this reaction before.
The Ngada highlands are the reason to be here, and by Ngada I mean both the landscape and the people. The mountains — Inerie, the symmetrical one, and its more rumpled neighbors — sit close enough to the town that they feel like presences rather than backdrop, something you’re always aware of at the edge of your vision. Between them and the town, on the slopes and in the valleys, the Ngada people have lived in their traditional villages for longer than anyone can precisely say. The most accessible are Bena and Luba, both within an easy drive or a longer walk, but there are smaller ones further up where the paths narrow and the villages see few visitors.
In Bajawa itself, the Sunday market is the center of things. I arrived at eight in the morning and the stalls were already deep in vegetables — bright yellow corn, purple sweet potatoes, chilies in every shade of red, bundles of lemongrass taller than my forearm. Women from the villages came in carrying baskets on their heads, in woven textiles that Flores is becoming rightly known for — deep indigo and russet and sometimes a yellow so vivid it registers almost as a sound. I bought a small piece of ikat and a kilo of unroasted coffee beans that I had no idea how to roast and carried both back to the guesthouse like trophies.
The food in Bajawa is honest mountain cooking. Rice and fish, mostly, even this far from the coast — dried and fried, in sambal that packs more heat than the coast versions. There was a warung near the market that served sayur labu — pumpkin greens in coconut milk — with a side of corn that had been roasted over charcoal until the kernels were slightly charred at the edges. I ate there three times. The woman who ran it seemed mildly pleased and mildly baffled that I kept returning.
What Bajawa does not have is much tourist infrastructure, and this is the source of its particular charm. The guesthouses are family-run and the wi-fi is slow and the evenings are quiet in a way that towns in Bali stopped being about twenty years ago. After dinner I sat on a plastic chair in front of the guesthouse and drank tea and watched motorcycles pass in ones and twos on the wet road, headlights cutting through the mist that rolled down from the volcano, and felt very far from anywhere I knew how to explain.
When to go: Bajawa is pleasant year-round due to its altitude — never as sweltering as the coast. The dry season (May to October) makes the mountain roads easier to navigate and the views of Inerie more reliable. The Sunday market runs regardless of season and is worth orienting a visit around.