Near DEATH Experience in Indonesia! My Cunca Wulang Waterfall Story

We were in Indonesia in 2014. Initially, we landed in Bali. It's the go-to place where every tourist goes. We also took a four-day boat trip from Lombok to Komodo National Park and saw the Komodo dragons and that was a crazy unique experience. After Komodo National Park, we ended up in a place called Labuan Bajo. We stayed there for a couple days, resting up. Our next spot that we were going to was this area called Moni and that's known for a volcano there called Kelimutu, which has four different colored lakes at the top of it. When we were in Labuan Bajo, we looked around online to see what there was to do. I can't remember if we planned it before we got there or decided what to do when we got there. There's a waterfall about an hour away, I think it was an hour or so, and it was Kunkowulong Waterfall. I believe it's on Google Maps, a popular spot. We wanted to go there because they have cliff jumping there. So, we decided to rent a scooter and it was super cheap. I can't remember, it was probably like five bucks to rent the scooter, maybe even cheaper than that at the time. It was a pretty straightforward ride on the scooter until we got to some crazy, rutted dirt roads. The thing about the Kunkowulong Waterfall is that we read that you have to have a guide, so we got to this small town. We didn't really see anybody around. There was maybe a guide stand or a tourism office, a little run-down shack or something like that. There was nobody there, so we kind of drove into this town and were like, we don't see any guides. So, we just kind of kept going where we thought the waterfall was based off of Google Maps. We went down the crazy, rutted road as far as we could go and then it got down to this little trail and we kept going. Eventually, the trail got so overgrown, we parked the scooter and hoped for the best. Then we hiked to the waterfall, it wasn't that far. We saw where other people who had guides were jumping and we decided we would start jumping. So, we did. We must have jumped off that thing, I don't know, probably 10 times each at least. What happened at one point was I had talked to my wife about going to explore kind of where the actual waterfall was because we were on this ledge and it was kind of like a calm part of the river and then the waterfall was a little further upstream. There was a baby falls and then you kind of go over that and then there was the waterfall and a big pool. We didn't know if there was another way to get around up to the top or anything because obviously we didn't have a guide, there was nobody else there. So, I talked to my wife about doing that. I saw her swimming in that direction, so she was swimming and I was like, I'm gonna go jump again. So, I climbed back up to the top. I jumped off and I got to the bottom and I looked around and I didn't see my wife, so I assumed she had climbed up the baby falls and gone up to the big waterfall and the pool there. And so I started swimming that way. I kind of shimmied up that baby falls and I was like, wow, I can't believe she climbed up this thing because it was pretty tough for me because the flow was kind of focused to one small point and it was pretty tough to fight that to get up that baby falls up into that big pool. And when I got into the big pool, I was like, holy crap, this is crazy. It was turbulent flow, it was a lot of hydraulics, it was, let's see, it was probably, I would say late April, early May, something like that. And it was just raging, so I don't know what the flow's like normally there, but I was in that pool, it was a lot of hydraulics, I'm a strong swimmer and it was hard for me to kind of keep my head above water and it was just sucking me under, sucking me under and I was like, where is Sam? Where is my wife? And I started freaking out. I started yelling her name and then at one point I kind of went under a little bit to see maybe she was stuck under something and I felt, I don't know if it was a cave, but it was like a curved out indentation under the rock. It felt like maybe a cave that went under and I was like, holy ----, like did she get pushed under this cave? And I started freaking out, like I literally thought she was being held under possibly in this cave. I went under and then I was worried about if I was going to get held under that cave, I didn't know what to do and I was screaming and I was panicking, I was screaming her name, I was struggling to keep my head above water and I thought that I was going to lose her and it's really intense, it's really intense to think about right now and I'm sorry if I start breaking down, but the feeling that I had in that moment was just so terrible and I was worried that if I went under and tried to find her, I couldn't feel her, I couldn't feel her under there and I didn't know what I was going to do and I was worried that I was going to die too, so it was a terrible feeling, it was a terrible feeling. But then I, she heard me yelling, she heard me yelling, she actually was not in there, she was out in another part of the river. She had gone to climb back up to do the jump on the ledge and she heard me yelling and then she started swimming up to the baby falls and yelling my name and I heard her and then I got out of there and it was, I was so grateful, I was so grateful that she wasn't, that she wasn't there and I just, I just remember feeling so happy and so grateful that she didn't, she wasn't in there and it was a powerful, it was a powerful moment for me and it changed, that event I think permanently changed the way I feel. That and some other, some other events changed the way I feel about guides, especially local guides in a small third world country like that, like you need to know how to do things safely sometimes and I love to get out there and do stuff on my own, but like when I'm with my wife, I just, like safety, her safety is my primary concern, so I'm not opposed to paying a couple bucks for a local guide anymore. Not only does it support, you know, their economy and their lifestyle and they can get some food for their family, but you know, it keeps me and more importantly her safe. In a place where you don't know the land, it's fun to explore, but to be 100% safe, if there's a guide available, especially one that's so dirt cheap that will show you, they'll probably tell you a lot more about the native plant species, animal species, possibly the history of the area. I don't have a problem, you know, supporting him and his family and making sure that me and my family are safe. So that was a valuable lesson that I learned about guides. Still you want to do your best to be diligent and you want to have your skills up to par. You want to be in good shape. You want to be a good swimmer. Obviously, if you're doing cliff jumping, you want to make sure that someone has depth checked it first. You're not just going off the word of some guide, right? So that was a crazy intense travel story. It kind of changed the tone of the rest of our trip actually, at least for me. Indonesia was beautiful. I highly recommend it. It's a lot of beautiful places to explore. I actually want to go back and explore a lot more of Indonesia and hopefully I'll be doing that in 2019. But if you ever go to Kunkowulong Waterfall outside of Labuan Bajo, might as well hire one of the local guides. But in the meantime, get out there, find your adventure, and be infamous. Infamous.