Getting There and Around in Flores

Part of the Flores travel guide — see every topic in All Flores Guides.

Flores has three useful airports — Labuan Bajo in the west, Ende in the centre-south and Maumere on the north-east coast — and one road connecting everything. The single most important planning decision is to fly into one end and out of the other, because retracing the Trans-Flores Highway costs days. The second is to allow for the road: seven hundred kilometres of continuous curves at thirty to forty kilometres an hour is a very different proposition from seven hundred kilometres anywhere else.

Flights

Labuan Bajo has the best connections, with direct services from Bali, Jakarta and Surabaya. Ende and Maumere are served from Kupang, Denpasar and occasionally Jakarta, usually on smaller aircraft and with fewer frequencies. Ruteng and Bajawa have small airfields with limited services. Fares from Denpasar are 700,000–2,500,000 rupiah. Book the internal legs early; capacity on the eastern routes is thin and cancellations happen. Weather-related delays are common on the smaller aircraft.

Getting around

A car with driver at 700,000–1,200,000 rupiah a day plus fuel and the driver's accommodation is the standard and the sensible choice: the driver knows the road, the villages and where to stop, and English-speaking guides can be arranged on top. Public buses and shared travel minivans connect all the towns cheaply, take much longer and run on their own schedule. Motorbike rental is possible in Labuan Bajo, Ende and Maumere and the ride is superb and demanding. There is no scheduled coastal boat along the island.

Ferries and onward

Ferries connect Labuan Bajo west to Sape on Sumbawa, and from there onward to Lombok and Bali — a long, cheap and genuinely interesting overland route. From Larantuka in the east, ferries run to Adonara, Solor, Lembata and Alor. Pelni's national passenger ships call at several Flores ports on their long inter-island loops. From Maumere and Ende there are also connections south to Kupang on Timor. All of these are slow and none is well publicised; ask locally rather than online.

Practicalities

Carry cash. ATMs exist in Labuan Bajo, Ruteng, Bajawa, Ende and Maumere and are unreliable, and almost nothing outside Labuan Bajo takes cards. Phone signal is patchy in the highlands. Fuel stations are spaced out. Take motion sickness medication for the first days. Drive in daylight. And build slack into the schedule: landslides close sections of the highway in the wet season, and a day lost to a blocked road is a normal part of travelling on Flores.

Getting There and Around at a glance

More in Flores

All 15 Flores guides·Indonesia tourist maps

Featured Videos