Orangutans & Dragons

After breakfast, you are picked up from your hotel and travel by motorized canoe to Pulau Kaja, a forested island where you can observe orangutans living in a natural environment managed by the Borneo Orangutan Survival Foundation (BOS). Continue by canoe to Bagantung, an extensive blackwater lake within a unique peatland swamp ecosystem, where you can spot birds and other wildlife while observing local fishing activities.

Cruise past the forested Selat and Badak Islands, where you may spot orangutans, proboscis monkeys, and endemic birds. Visit local Dayak villages, where you experience traditional dances, local hospitality, and the community’s way of life.

Walk through and explore a local runner plantation and learn about the processes growing and extracting the latex from source by tapping the trees. Learn about the many medicinal herbs and plants that can be found growing in the forest. Visit more local Dayak villages and learn about some of their traditional livelihoods, such as rattan weaving, and enjoy local entertainment in the form of a kacapi (two-stringed instrument) performance, and local self-defense or shadowboxing. Explore the tiny fishing village of Tundai, perched atop raised walkways on the edge of an expansive blackwater lake. Here, you float through here on canoes, admiring the stunning reflections and learning more about the unique fishing practices.

On the morning of Day 4, you transfer to the airport for your flights to Bali.
* If doing a 15-day journey, you will spend two nights in Bali with the extra day at your leisure.

You will be met at Komodo Airport in Labuan Bajo by your tour leaders and taken straight to your ship. After settling into your new home, you run an equipment check and head to a calm beach for an introductory snorkel from the shore, so you can find your feet in the water before you snorkel from the boat. Get hands-on at a coral restoration project. Learn how the fragmenting process works, where small pieces of healthy coral are used to grow new colonies. Attach your own fragments to a coral rack and place it in the water to grow.

At dusk, anchor off a small mangrove island to watch thousands of flying foxes leave their roosts and fly to the mainland to feed. These giant fruit bats are not only important to the health of their mangrove roosting area but pollinate flowers and spread seeds across the islands, helping the forests regrow. Go ashore on Rinca Island in search of wild Komodo dragons. The world’s largest lizard grows up to three meters long and about 70 kilograms, and is found in the wild only in this corner of Indonesia. Your guide will explain how, as the top predator on these islands, dragons shape the whole savanna ecosystem.

Go ashore on Sangeang, an active volcano rising straight from the sea. Here you see the Ring of Fire at work: fresh volcanic land, forest taking hold on its slopes and a colorful coral reef growing just offshore, where you snorkel. You also visit the local village to see how people farm the rich volcanic soil. Go ashore on forested Moyo Island and travel inland to a rainforest waterfall, where you can bathe in its cool pools. It is a chance to see how forest catches and holds the rain that feeds the island’s streams and, ultimately, the reefs.

Swim with whale sharks, the gentle giants of the sea, in Saleh Bay. These plankton-feeding sharks gather around the bagans, traditional floating fishing platforms whose lights draw in the small fish they eat. Learn how local fishers, the sharks and responsible visitors now share the bay, and how tourism gives fishing families a reason to protect them. Visit a Sumbawan village and watch the age-old tradition of buffalo racing, as local men drive their prized animals through a flooded rice padi.

Spend a day at Satonda, a volcanic island with a salt-water crater lake at its heart. Walk to the lake’s edge and snorkel the reef outside, comparing two very different water worlds on one small island.

Visit a village where boatbuilding lies at the heart of the culture. Large wooden pinisi ships, like your own vessel, sit along the shore in various stages of construction, built by hand using the UNESCO-recognised art of pinisi boatbuilding. Meet the builders and learn how their knowledge of wind, wood and sea passes between generations.

Spend a relaxing half day on an uninhabited island with its own pink beach. Swim, sunbathe, wakeboard and snorkel a rich coral reef, and learn where the pink comes from: fragments of tiny red corals mixed into the white sand.

Re-entering Komodo National Park, you drift and snorkel some of the park’s healthiest reefs. Swim with sea turtles as they cruise the shallows, and with manta rays as they feed in the current and circle cleaning stations, where small wrasse remove parasites from their skin, showing one of the clearest examples of mutual benefit in nature.

Enjoy a drift snorkel at Gili Lawa Darat, in the north of the park, then hike to the viewpoint for sunset over the islands.

Snorkel the Hatamin Island coral restoration project and see what can be achieved when like-minded people come together to solve a problem. Swim among racks placed over the years and see how restored coral brings fish and life back to the reef. Your guide explains how corals live in partnership with the microscopic algae inside them, and why that partnership breaks down when seas warm.

Enjoy one of the famous SeaTrek beach barbecues under a sky full of stars, with local dishes prepared by the chef and live music from the crew.

After breakfast on your final day, take a scenic drive to Melo Village to see the Caci dance of the Manggarai people. In this ritual, two performers armed with a whip and a rattan shield take turns to strike and parry, dancing to traditional music.

On your return from Melo Village, the team will take you to the airport for a farewell with your fellow shipmates and tour leaders, and to check in for your onward flight.