Padar and Komodo are dry islands in eastern Indonesia, hills of burnt gold grass rather than rainforest, and the largest lizard alive still walks down onto their beaches. Meeting one is done on foot. On the hillsides of Komodo and Rinca a licensed ranger walks you into the dragons' own ground. You may find one basking across the trail or shouldering through the scrub, close enough to hear its claws on the dust. This is the only place on Earth they still live wild. For decades they were thought to kill with a mouthful of septic bacteria; it is actually venom, from glands in the lower jaw, and bitten prey is followed until it drops.
Padar's spine is a thirty-minute climb, steep and bare the whole way, with the sea dropping off both sides of you. At the saddle three crescent bays open, black, white and pink sand curving under serrated ridges. No dragon will meet you up here. Padar's own population died out, most likely once the deer and wild boar were hunted off and there was nothing left to eat. The rest of the day belongs to the water. You wade in off one of those beaches, the white sand squeaking underfoot and the reef showing through the shallows, and snorkel out to the drop-off. At Manta Point giant reef mantas come in to hover over the coral while small fish pick them clean, and you float above wingspans wider than you are tall. North of Komodo, a short climb up the grass spine of Gili Lawa opens the maze of coves and channels between the islands. Most people cross the park on a phinisi, the tall wooden schooner, and watch the islands go copper and then violet from its deck. Those three colours under Padar each come from somewhere different. Dark volcanic grains make the black bay and ground coral and shell the white, and the pink is a reef animal, red-skeletoned, broken up by the surf and mixed through the sand you stand on.