Ende announced itself through the ferry window as a loose scatter of white buildings on a dark harbor, backed by the unambiguous shape of Gunung Meja — flat-topped, vertiginous — rising directly from the urban edge of town. There is no gentle preamble to Ende. The mountain is just there, decisive, the way landscape in eastern Indonesia tends to be.
I had come partly for the history. Between 1934 and 1938, a young Sukarno — later the first president of independent Indonesia — was exiled here by the Dutch, who had grown tired of his nationalist agitating and wanted somewhere to put him where he could not cause problems. They chose Ende. He spent four years in a small house on Jalan Perwira that still stands, more or less as it was, and in the evenings he sat under a breadfruit tree in the square and watched the locals and thought his thoughts. The breadfruit tree is still there too, marked with a small plaque. I sat under it in the late afternoon and tried to imagine what it meant to be confined to an island as beautiful as this.
The harbor is Ende’s actual center of gravity. Boats leave from here for the southern islands and for Waingapu in Sumba; the fish market runs before dawn and you have to want it to find it, scrambling down past the ferry terminal in darkness to where the catches come in and the auction is conducted in a code I couldn’t decipher. The smell is overwhelming — salt and innards and the deep ocean smell that clings to nets — and the work is fast and physical and completely indifferent to observers. I watched for an hour and felt like a person watching a language being spoken that they can hear but not understand.
The Ikat textiles from Ende district are among the most technically complex in Flores. In the market I found pieces from the Ende and Lio people — dark backgrounds with geometric patterns in rust and yellow and sometimes a white so precise it looked embroidered rather than woven. A woman named Yohana explained the traditional motifs to me through a combination of Indonesian and patient gesturing — this pattern means protection, this one is for marriage, this asymmetry is intentional, not a mistake. I bought a piece that had taken her three months to make and which she priced with an accuracy that told me she had calculated the labor exactly.
Ende’s streets in the evening have a comfortable provincialism — food carts appearing after seven, motorbikes parting for nothing, a warmth of sodium street lamps over dark bitumen. I ate at a warung near the market that specialized in ikan pepes — fish steamed in banana leaf parcels with tomato and chili and lemongrass — and ordered it with a portion of rice and a glass of sweet iced tea and sat at a plastic table while the street life happened around me. The fish was fresh in the way that fish in landlocked cities never quite manages to be.
When to go: Ende is accessible year-round by air and sea, though the south coast can be rough from December through March. The dry season from May to October makes for calmer seas and clearer views of Gunung Meja. The morning fish market runs daily, but is most active Tuesday through Saturday when the larger boats come in.