Padar Island
"I've climbed a lot of viewpoints for a photo. Padar is the only one that made me forget to take it."
A steep staircase, a saddle in the clouds, and three crescent bays in three shades of sand — Padar earns every step.
Our boat idled off Padar for a good ten minutes before anyone moved, all of us just staring at the island’s silhouette against the pre-dawn grey — this jagged little hump of rock sitting alone in the strait between Komodo and Rinca. We’d left Labuan Bajo at something like 4:30am, coffee in paper cups, half the other passengers asleep on the deck cushions. Lia wasn’t one of them. She’d read that Padar has no dragons of its own, unlike its two famous neighbors, and kept saying she felt oddly safe about that, like we’d earned one hike in Komodo National Park without scanning the bushes.
The staircase up is no joke — it’s not long by hiking standards, maybe forty minutes, but it climbs close to 300 meters in switchbacks cut straight into dry, exposed hillside, and by the third landing my shirt was stuck to my back. What got me moving faster than my legs wanted was watching the view assemble itself piece by piece: first one bay, then a second ridge revealing the third, until we hit the saddle and the whole thing opened up at once — three separate crescent beaches, one with sand gone almost black, another blushing pale pink, curling around bays of water in that impossible turquoise-to-navy gradient. It’s the image every Komodo brochure uses, and I’d braced myself to be unimpressed by something so photographed. I wasn’t.
We sat up there for almost an hour, sharing a bag of roasted peanuts I’d bought at a stall in Labuan Bajo the night before, watching other boats’ lights cross the strait toward Komodo and Rinca. Lia pointed out that a dragon occasionally swims across from those islands to Padar, which is technically true and which she absolutely did not need to tell me at that particular moment on a rock ledge with no fence. I made her repeat it twice just to feel appropriately unsettled. Below us, our own boat looked like a toy pinned to the pink-sand bay, and I remember thinking that Komodo National Park being both a UNESCO World Heritage Site and a Biosphere Reserve since 1977 suddenly made complete sense from up here — it’s not a place you protect for one reason.
Coming down was almost harder than going up, that loose scree underfoot demanding as much attention as the view had. We were back on the boat before 8am, salty and sunburned already, and I remember Lia saying she’d happily do it again the next morning if we could. I would too.
When to go: We went in October, right in that window between April–June and September–November when the seas stay calm enough for an early crossing and the saddle viewpoint isn’t fighting haze — worth timing your Flores trip around if sunrise photos matter to you.