Wae Rebo, trekking to the Mbaru Niang houses

Wae Rebo is a village in Satar Lenda Village, Rana Mese Subdistrict, East Manggarai Regency, East Nusa Tenggara Province, Indonesia, where residents cling to ancient traditions and remain in cone-shaped palm roof houses called Mbaru Niang.

Wae Rebo or often referred to as the country in the cloud is located on a plateau on the island of Flores and is reached from Labuan Bajo, then travels overland to Denge for 3-4 hours.

Denge is the closest village to Wae Rebo which is located in a valley between mountains with 4 hours trekking. Tracks include rocky roads, uphill dirt roads to rivers with bamboo bridges.

Wae Rebo is the home of the Modo tribe and UNESCO awarded Mbaru Niang a form of cultural heritage conservation. The Wae Rebo community still maintains their traditional traditions and culture from generation to generation.

This village is one of the natural and cultural tourist destinations in Flores. Wae Rebo is in mountain valleys and plateaus, but residents prepare sleeping mats, clean thick blankets and dinners for visitors.

Dlium.com Wae Rebo, trekking to the Mbaru Niang houses

Wae Rebo trekking starts from Denge for 4 hours but along this hard journey you will get beautiful views on the right and left of the road. Travelers must hire a local guide from Manggarai as a guide and also as a porter.

The track towards Wae Rebo 8-9 kilometers which is very draining and makes the entire thigh and calf muscles burn. This village has a library and visitors can donate books.

Each visitor sounds "kentongan" or a bamboo bell placed in a bamboo building as a sign of arrival. Residents and tribal leaders then carry out a welcoming ritual, but visitors are not allowed to take pictures and videos.

The Waelu ceremony is a kind of welcome for visitors where the chieftain will deliver a speech and pray for visitors for safety, security and avoiding danger in life.

Thomas Sutikna lives with Homo floresiensis

BLOG - On October 28, 2004, a paper was published in Nature describing the dwarf hominin we know today as Homo floresiensis that has shocked the world. The report changed the geographical landscape of early humans that previously stated that the Pleistocene Asia was only represented by two species, Homo erectus and Homo sapiens . The report titled "A new small-bodied hominin from the Late Pleistocene of Flores, Indonesia" written by Peter Brown and Mike J. Morwood from the University of New England with Thomas Sutikna, Raden Pandji Soejono, Jatmiko, E. Wahyu Saptomo and Rokus Awe Due from the National Archaeology Research Institute (ARKENAS), Indonesia, presents more diversity in the genus Homo. “Immediately, my fever vanished. I couldn’t sleep well that night. I couldn’t wait for sunrise. In the early morning we went to the site, and when we arrived in the cave, I didn’t say a thing because both my mind and heart couldn’t handle this incredible moment. I just went down

Elephant bell gourd (Trichosanthes tricuspidata)

Elephant bell gourd ( Trichosanthes tricuspidata ) is a plant species in the Cucurbitaceae, stems grow elongated to propagate or climb, many branches, cylindrical in shape and green in color. T. cochinchinensis has stem tips or branches that twist to attach themselves to a support or other plant. It grows to climb to cover a support, usually on another plant, up to several meters and creeps along the ground to reach another support. Arrow-shaped leaves, split base, sharp apex and two wings at an acute angle, have many veins ending at a sharp edge, green and have a long petiole. Single flower is white. The fruit is round to oval, ends with a tail, young green and turns red with maturity, thin skin, thick flesh and reddish yellow, has a short stalk and hangs. The seeds are in the middle of the fruit. Seeds are white, oval and flat. Black coated seeds. Elephant bell gourd grows wild in primary and secondary forests, agricultural land, roadsides, watersheds, especially on slopes, damp a

Yellow fever mosquito (Aedes aegypti) use thermal infrared to navigate hosts

NEWS - Aedes aegypti transmits the viruses that cause dengue, yellow fever, Zika and other diseases every year, while Anopheles gambiae transmits the parasite that causes malaria. Their capacity to transmit disease has made mosquitoes the deadliest animals. Moreover, climate change and global travel have expanded the range of A. aegypti beyond tropical geography. The mosquitoes are now present in subtropical climates that were previously unheard of just a few years ago. Male mosquitoes are harmless, but females need blood for egg development. There is no single cue that these insects rely on to feed; they integrate information from many different senses across a wide range of distances. " A. aegypti very adept at finding human hosts. This work provides a new insight into how they achieve this. Once we got all the right parameters, the results were clear and undeniable," says Nicolas DeBeaubien of the University of California at Santa Barbara UCSB. The researchers added

Nactus simakal, gecko evolved in geomorphological habitat of Dauan Island

NEWS - Researchers report a new species of Nactus simakal that lives in a boulder-strewn habitat with deep crevices on Dauan Island in the northern Torres Strait. The Torres Strait Islands lie between Cape York Peninsula, north-eastern Australia, and the southern coast of Papua New Guinea and are rare in gecko biodiversity. The vertebrate fauna of the islands is a mix of Australian and New Guinean species with only two endemic species described to date. Conrad Hoskin of James Cook University in Townsville and colleagues describe the new species as highly distinctive based on ND2 mtDNA genetics and morphologically on its slender, elongated striped pattern. N. simakal is broadly similar to Nactus galgajuga (Ingram, 1978) which is restricted to a boulder-strewn habitat about 750 km to the south in mainland north-eastern Queensland, but is easily distinguished morphologically and genetically from saxicolines. N. simakal is the second vertebrate species to be described and considered

Dlium