sail away

Cruising around the starkly beautiful islands that make up Indonesia’s Komodo National Park, Sunil Badami discovers there’s so much more to the region than just the famous dragons

Soon after the turn of the 20th century, rumors began making their way west that man-eating lizards, 10 feet long and weighing up to 350 pounds, with fearsome talons, chain mail scales, and serrated teeth dripping with venom, had been found living on a remote Indonesian island. The source of the reports was Lieutenant Jacques Karel Henri van Steyn van Hensbroek, a Dutch colonial officer, who revealed the existence of Varanus komodoensis, the world's largest extant reptile, in 1910. But it was a 1926 American Museum of Natural History expedition to capture live specimens, led by a flamboyant Vanderbilt scion named William Douglas Burden, that caused interest in the creature to explode in popular culture. Burden's gripping account, Dragon Lizards of Komodo, inspired his friend Merian C. Cooper to dream up the primordial Skull Island for his classic 1933 film, King Kong. Civilization was steaming forward, and yet, in that era, the map still seemed to hold places that hid ancient secrets.

I arrived in Labuan Bajo, on the western coast of the Indonesian island of Flores, to find out if, nearly a century later, there was still anything left to discover. The town is the gateway to the 670-square-mile Komodo National Park, a UNESCO World Heritage Site that encompasses the forbidding volcanic islands of Komodo, Padar, and Rinca as well as numerous smaller ones. They're home not only to Komodo dragons but also to whales, turtles, dugongs, manta rays, and more than a thousand fish species. I had come to meet Adrien Portier, a young French entrepreneur, who, with his business partner Dimitri Tran, commissioned Vela, a luxurious 164-foot sailboat that is designed to cruise Indonesia's wildest and most beautiful islands.