Dragons are not to be taken lightly: male lizards can grow up to 10 feet long, weigh 150 pounds and eat up to 80 percent of their own body weight in one sitting. ( Read Brendan Borell’s dispatch from his trip to Komodo Island, as featured in our special “ Evotourism” issue of Smithsonian magazine.) In recent years, visitors have increasingly flooded this corner of Indonesia, drawn in by the thrill of brushing close to something wild and dangerous. Like so many other tourists, for me, a trip to Indonesia was not complete without a detour to see the world’s largest lizard in its natural habitat. Now, are you ready to go see the dragons?” “No really, they’re actually just baby mangrove markers that tourists bought to restore the forest. On each stick, a date and a foreigner’s name was scrawled in white paint. Safina laughed while gesturing to a row of little wooden crosses stuck in the nearby mud. Standing in front of an assembly line of water buffalo, deer and wild horse skulls – dragon chow – Mr. He’d lived on Rinca – a speck of land off Indonesia’s Flores Island, and one of the five places Komodo dragons reside – his whole life, and he was used to the various horror stories that surfaced every now and then after a tourist wandered off the trail or a kid got ambushed while playing in the bush.
Safina, a local guide working at Komodo National Park, took a particular relish in describing the way a Komodo dragon’s strong jaws can snap a man’s leg in two. A Komodo dragon lounges near the Komodo National Park welcome center on Rinca Island.
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