Our first day in Labuan Bajo had already given us caves and the best grilled fish of our lives. Days two and three decided to raise the stakes: a genuine shark bite, a sky full of giant bats, and the fishing trip Vitus had been talking about since before we left Denmark. Not everything went to plan — but the bits that went wrong turned out to be half the fun.
Day two — a slow morning and a sunset cruise
We woke around 8:30 and went down for breakfast — fried eggs for Vitus, coffee, fruit and omelets for the rest of us. Then a deliberately lazy morning by the pool before the 11am shuttle into town. We'd booked an afternoon sunset boat tour, so the plan was: lunch, a couple of islands, some snorkelling, sunset, and the flying foxes at dusk.
Lunch first, at Hong Seafood Restaurant in town, which was genuinely very good, and then off to the harbour to board the boat. About 45 minutes of sailing later we reached our first stop: Kelor Island.
Kelor Island — a viewpoint and a small shark with a big attitude
Kelor has a short but sharp climb — only about 35 vertical metres, but in that heat it felt like more — up to a viewpoint over the islands. It's a classic sunset-tour stop, so we shared the top with a good crowd of other tourists, but the view across the archipelago (our liveaboard boat parked below) was worth the sweat.
Back down, we had 20–25 minutes to swim from the little beach. The left side was crowded so we took the quieter right. The guide had warned there wasn't much to see — and then promptly proved himself wrong: nice coral, plenty of fish, and lots of little blacktip reef sharks cruising the shallows. Tiny things, maybe 50–70cm long. At first they were delightful to watch.
Then Line, standing in the shallows after her snorkel, felt something bite her hard behind the knee. She screamed and leapt out of the water; people nearby confirmed it had been one of the little reef sharks, and apparently a couple of other swimmers had been nipped too. The bite was small but it broke the skin, and blood ran down her leg. Jesper and the boys found it deeply unfair that Line now got to say she'd survived a real shark attack — a claim she was, understandably, less amused by in the moment. The shark may have been half a metre long, but we've checked the rules, and the story technically counts.
At the next snorkel spot, Line's snorkel decided to stop letting air through, so she sat most of it out. Jesper and the boys, on the other hand, hit the jackpot: a sea turtle, a sea snake, clouds of fish and surprisingly beautiful coral — a lot of it soft coral, which gave the whole reef a different, waving, almost alien texture from the harder reefs we're used to.
Sunset and the flying foxes
From there we sailed on to watch the sun go down over the islands from the deck. The light across the archipelago was ridiculous — the kind of sky that makes everyone go quiet and reach for a camera.
Then we motored over to the mangroves for the evening's main event. Every night, thousands of flying foxes — big fruit bats — pour out of the mangrove forest and stream across the water toward Labuan Bajo. We waited with maybe 50 other boats, and when the bats finally came, they came in enormous, sky-filling numbers. We've seen bat exoduses elsewhere in the world, but watching these big animals cross the dusk sky over a flotilla of little boats was still genuinely special.
The sail home took about an hour, and near the end Jesper was hit by sudden, severe stomach cramps — eerily similar to what Vitus went through at Kuala Lumpur airport. Not food-poisoning-ish, more like vicious cramping or trapped air, but properly painful. Between that and the looming 9pm shuttle, dinner became a no-nonsense stop at KFC, which the boys (Vitus especially) considered an upgrade. Jesper managed a little rice and chicken, and, exactly like Vitus's episode, the pain vanished after an hour or so, as fast as it had arrived. By bedtime he was fine.
Day three — the fishing trip that nearly didn’t happen
Day three was the big one for Vitus. He had been talking about going fishing — proper fishing, where you actually catch something — since we first started planning this whole trip. Pick-up was booked for 9am, so we were up before 8 and rushed breakfast. And then… no driver.
We waited. And waited. Jesper rang the agency repeatedly with no answer, and for a while we genuinely thought we'd been scammed. They finally rolled up around 10am — an hour late — and drove us to the harbour, where we still weren't going anywhere. The boat wasn't set up for fishing: they had to hunt down rods, then realised they had no bait, then needed water and various other things, and the ancient engine took many attempts to start. It was gone 11am before we actually left Labuan Bajo. A shambolic start, all told.
And then the day completely turned around. The plan was to drop Jesper and Noah at a small island to snorkel while Line and Vitus went fishing. Jesper and Noah were left on a lovely beach with a reef that vastly outperformed expectations — not many big animals, but masses of fish and a lot of healthy soft coral in shapes and colours we hadn't seen before. A properly alive reef, which is always reassuring to find.
Better still, the crowd of tour boats eventually cleared out and Jesper and Noah had the little island almost entirely to themselves for an hour or so. They snorkelled, lazed about, and—because they're them—collected dead lumps of coral off the beach to use as pétanque balls, inventing a whole game with a piece of fruit as the jack. One of those unplanned, perfectly peaceful stretches you can't book.
Meanwhile Line and Vitus were out at two different fishing spots, and between them they landed eight fish — two for Line, six for Vitus. The very first one came fast and turned out to be the biggest of the day. Vitus was absolutely buzzing; the fish photos were fired off to his classmates back home within minutes.
After about two and a half hours of fishing in the heat, Line and Vitus had had enough and came back to the island. They both jumped in to cool off and snorkel the reef — and Vitus, who'd initially declared he didn't feel like snorkelling, was talked into the mask and then flatly refused to come back out, drifting around for ages while the boatmen grew visibly twitchy about the trip home.
Cooking our own catch at the Horny Crab
Back in town, Vitus picked out three of his fish, carried them off the boat in a plastic bag, and we set off up through Labuan Bajo hunting for a restaurant willing to cook them for us. We landed at a small, cosy place with lovely owners — the name was something like the Horny Crab — who happily agreed to grill our three fish. We added rice, grilled vegetables, a few sides and drinks, and sat down to either a very late lunch or a very early dinner at about 4:30pm.
Eating fish that Line and Vitus had caught themselves, freshly grilled and laid out in front of us, was one of those genuinely great travel moments — and it tasted every bit as good as the story deserved.
…and then a doctor, for a mosquito-sized shark bite
We caught the 6:30pm shuttle back, and by the evening Line was still turning the shark bite over in her mind. Jesper had read up on marine bites, and the advice was consistent: get them looked at, because sea-creature bites can cause infections that ordinary land grazes don't. Line had also messaged a friend who's a wound-care nurse, who said antibiotics might be needed if it showed any sign of infection. Given that we were about to spend several days on a boat in Komodo with limited access to medical help, Line decided to see a nearby doctor — even though, from more than a metre away, the wound looked like a small mosquito bite.
Jesper found the whole expedition hilarious and laughed most of the way there and back, while also being mildly irritated at spending an evening at a clinic for something so tiny. The receptionist clearly shared the internal conflict, snorting a couple of times while heroically trying to keep a straight face. The doctor, to her great credit, took it seriously, cleaned the wound properly and prescribed an antibiotic cream for the coming days — which, heading out onto a multi-day boat trip, was almost certainly the sensible call, however ridiculous it felt at the time. And on that note — one survived shark attack, eight fish and a clean bill of health — our Labuan Bajo days came to an end. Next stop: the boat, and Komodo National Park itself.
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