Where the day ends, and the bats begin

Kalong closes the first day on the routes, after the sail to Kelor and the walk at Rinca, and it asks the least of you. There is no landing, no path, no gear, only a mangrove islet between Komodo and Rinca, a boat at anchor off it and a party that has had a long, bright day and is happy to sit still. The word kalong means flying fox, and the islet is where thousands of them sleep through the daylight hanging in the mangroves.

Nothing happens for a while, and then everything does. The sun goes down behind the hills, the sky turns the colour of a peach, and a few bats rise out of the trees, followed by a few hundred more.

The first bats appear some 15 minutes after sunset and the flight carries on for about half an hour, a long line across the sky, so arrive early and do not hurry. The deck is the place to watch from: Kalong is not a landing stop, and a roost is best left undisturbed. On the day it is the stillness that impresses, with the whole party facing the same direction and the engine off.

A long lens helps, a charged phone helps more, and a pair of binoculars helps most of all if someone has remembered them. Sunset is the hour the whole day was arranged around, and nobody on the crew can speed it up or slow it down.

The table follows sunset through the year, and the bats follow the sunset. In July it falls at 17:57, and in December at 18:14. The last column gives the hour at which the flight begins, which is 15 minutes later, and the note under the table says what it means: the times are computed, accurate to a few minutes, and the crew adjusts to the actual sky.

If cloud is heavy the colour fades and the bats still fly. Rain is another matter, and the captain settles where the boat lies and whether the deck is dry enough to stand on. Allow for a little swell at anchor, since a mangrove channel is not a millpond, and keep a hand free for the rail. Be on deck early, and stay.