Bajawa is a cool highland town in the middle of Flores, and the first thing the body notices is the temperature. You arrive from the sticky coast and climb to around eleven hundred metres, where evenings need a jacket and the air smells of woodsmoke and clove. The town sits in a bowl at the foot of Mount Inerie, a graceful volcano of over two thousand metres whose cone dominates the southern skyline, and its slopes are covered in coffee, vegetables and clove trees. This is the heartland of the Ngada people, whose villages of thatched houses, ancestral shrines and megalithic stones lie within an hour or two of the town.
The Trans-Flores Highway is the reason most people come by motorbike, and it is a great road, though not an easy one. It winds along the spine of the island through rainforest, rice terraces, volcanic craters and fishing villages, hair-pinning up and over ridge after ridge, and you rarely get more than a few hundred metres of straight tarmac. The surface can be broken by landslides, potholes and rain, trucks and buses come round blind corners well over the middle line, and the pace is rarely more than forty kilometres an hour, so a day's progress is shorter than the map suggests. Ride in daylight, as dusk comes fast and the roads are unlit, and expect afternoon rain, especially from November to March.
Bajawa itself is a real town, with petrol stations, markets, small hotels and warungs where you can get rice, grilled chicken and strong local coffee. Flores arabica is well regarded, and the beans are grown at just this kind of altitude. Fill up in town before heading east or west, because the long stretches between villages have only roadside bottles of petrol on sale from small stalls, which are best used only in emergency.
Close by lie traditional villages such as Bena and Luba, where rows of houses face a central yard of stones, with carved poles known as ngadhu and little thatched shrines called bhaga standing for male and female ancestors. They are lived-in places, not museums, so ask before photographing people and expect a small donation to be requested at the entrance. Portuguese traders and Dominican priests left a Catholic imprint, and you will see churches, crosses and rosaries in a country that is mostly Muslim.
Hot springs near Soa and the black-sand beaches of the south coast give good reasons to stay a night or two.