June 5, 2018

Surfing Rote

The SEA SALT Surfing, Travel Belar Reef Bungalows, how to get to Rote, Rote, Tland, where to stay in Rote 2 Comments

I was talking to a friend the other day about the difference between “vacation” and “traveling.” There are definitely people who like to stay in nice hotels and be brought drinks by the pool (sounds relaxing, and good on you!), and people who like to get amongst it and get a little dirty while they’re away from home.

There’s nothing better about one or the other, but Miles and I are definitely “travel” people. We’ve traveled a bit since we’ve gotten married, which has been a priority for us. We don’t pay a cable bill, drive fancy cars or own a house. We allocate our money to traveling as much as possible.

We decided to go back to Indonesia this year. We’ve been to Bali and loved it, but we wanted to go somewhere a little less crowded both on land and in the water. We heard about the island of Rote while we were in the Philippines and a perfect left called T-Land. It was supposedly like Bali was 40 years ago (it was!), but hard to get to. We put it on our list and this year we finally booked the four flights. We also met our good friends out there, who flew all the way from Philadelphia. If you’re curious, we flew Philippine Airways through Manila and into Jakarta (avoiding the 12 hr standard layover through Bali), and then into Kupang, and finally Rote. You can often times take a ferry from Kupang to Rote but it wasn’t running because of the wind, so we booked a 30$ flight last minute and we were glad we did. We had also heard that they were strict on board allowances but we didn’t have any issues taking a board bag with 3 boards on that flight (it was 200,000 RP per board). 

We stayed at Belar Reef and loved it. I can’t say enough about the hosts, the food, or the bungalows we stayed in. We checked out the other resorts in Nemberala while we were there and we were really glad we stayed where we did. We spent our days motorbiking around the island checking out empty beaches, local villages, mangrove forests and markets. We surfed crystal clear, warm water, ate lots of fresh seafood and drank our fair share of Bintangs. The island is fairly dry in comparison to the rest of Indo so there weren’t many bugs which was super nice. Talk about free range animals, there were pigs and cow everywhere! I don’t know who they belonged to, but they were in the streets, on the beach, and swimming in the water. 

Because in the end, you won’t remember the time you spent working in the office or mowing your lawn. Climb that goddamn mountain. -Kerouac