Well, if you thought Komodo Island was a rock like, desert like sandy place, deserted except for the horrible dragons that live there...wrong! First, Indonesia has over 1,700 islands that make up the entire country. Komodo is a tiny spec of a place in this 3,000 mile long chain of islands that would extend further than from California to New York!
If you saw Jurassic Park, you may have some semblance of what we did. The island is lush in landscape, way more than I ever thought. Wild orchids on most trees, trees that have leaves that can be used for all kinds of ailments, palm trees, ferns, fruit trees, flowers in bloom....crazy. AND 2,000 people LIVE here with these awful dragons! Last week a man fell out of a tree while trying to get fruit and fell into the path of a Komodo dragon that happened to be passing by. The man escaped the dragon, however, the dragon gave him such terrible bites that the toxin the dragon injected to him was more than the hospital he was sent to could reverse. He died. It is the saliva of the Komodo dragon that is toxic! The Komodo dragons are carnivores. They like to eat rotting flesh. They attack the wild deer, wild boars, wild buffaloes, wild cats and cobras that live here!! They did not mention the wild cats and cobras until we were already a good quarter of a mile into our trek! Wild cats perched in trees to pounce, cobras slithering underfoot, and the Komodo dragons looking for a nice piece of Alabama tender calves passing by at their eye level in the bush was enough to make your skin crawl! Some loud sounds of "groaning" in the bush had to be a buffalo or a boar. We just kept walking.... The guides stayed with us every step of the way with their oh so protective sticks with a forked end! If a dragon wanted to snap the stick, he could do it with little effort!
We were SO lucky to be able to "track" a Komodo dragon by finding some "droppings" on our trail! Any boy scouts/girl scouts would have loved this or anyone that has made a trip to Africa! The "droppings" of this dragon we captured on film for everyone. The whitish liquid is calcium from the bones that the dragon chewed up as he was enjoying the deer he had eaten. The one large "clump" is the ankle bone of the deer! The butterflies all around made it more enjoyable to study!!!
The trek up the mountain was worth the effort, although it was extremely HOT and not many of us had dry clothes when we made it down the hill to the stalls set up for our chance to buy Komodo Island treasures! New t-shirts were a good buy.
The dragons themselves. Brace yourselves, the island has about 1,200 Komodo dragons. All of them are in the wild and might end up on your porch or at your picnic! They are giant monitor lizards. The males can grow up to 10 feet long and weigh 300 pounds! They can run about 10 MPH!! They can't climb trees though! However, if climbing a tree to get away from one, make sure you don't climb into a tree that has a wild cat in it! The female dragons lay up to 30 eggs at a time and it take 8-9 months for the eggs to hatch! The odds are only half of the eggs will develop as other lizards like to eat the eggs and they do eat each other! Tough world they live in there!!
The dragons seem to have a constant stream of that awful saliva hanging from their jaws. They smell worse than any section of any zoo in the world and have faces that not even their own mother would love! A fascinating stop. A place that is the closest thing to going back to the period of the dinosaurs. If you love that type thing...this is a must see spot in the world! Our day was wonderful. No bites from dragons, cobras, boars, wild cats, or bats!! Success!!!! And no mosquitoes!!!!
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