Labuan Bajo

I arrived in Labuan Bajo on a prop plane from Bali, and the first thing I saw through the scratched oval window was water — turquoise bleeding into dark blue, scattered with islands so green they looked artificial. Then the runway materialized out of a hillside and we dropped in fast, and before I had even retrieved my bag the salt air was through the terminal doors and the harbor was right there, close enough to smell. It smells of diesel and fish and something sweet underneath that I never quite identified.

Labuan Bajo is having an identity crisis that it may never resolve. A decade ago it was a scruffy fishing town at the western tip of Flores — a few guesthouses, a market, boats to Komodo. Now it has a strip of restaurants overlooking the harbor that charge Seminyak prices for grilled fish, and the boats in the water lean toward gleaming liveaboards rather than the painted wooden vessels that still cling to the far end of the dock. The government has declared it a premium tourism destination. The old town watches from the hill, uncertain what to make of all this.

But the water is still the water, and the water is extraordinary. From Labuan Bajo you can reach Komodo Island and Rinca Island — where the dragons are — in about two hours by speedboat. You can reach Pink Beach in ninety minutes. The dive sites around Batu Bolong, the shoal of schooling fish at Manta Point, the current-swept walls of Castle Rock — these are some of the most consistently impressive reefs I have ever entered. I did three days on a boat, sleeping on the deck under stars, and ate instant noodles at midnight with the crew and watched phosphorescence trail behind our anchor line. That part has not changed.

In town I found what I was looking for in the market behind the harbor road — the actual one, not the tourist version. Women from villages selling papaya and bananas, dried fish laid out on cloths, a warung in the back where a woman served me soto ayam with a poached egg floating in the broth and charged me twelve thousand rupiah. The soup had the kind of depth that comes from a stock that started yesterday. I ate it standing up and ordered another. That market, at seven in the morning, is more Labuan Bajo than anything on the strip.

The sunsets are famous and the fame is earned. The harbor faces west, and when the sun drops behind the islands it does so with theatrical commitment — orange into red into a purple that lingers long after the light is technically gone. Every restaurant has chairs pointed at it. Even the most cynical version of yourself will stop and watch.

When to go: April through October is dry season and the sea is calm enough for comfortable boat travel. July and August bring the most divers and the highest prices — May and June hit the sweet spot of good conditions with lighter crowds. Avoid January and February when swells make the crossing to Komodo uncomfortable.