Rinca Island

Rincah, also known as Rinca and Rindja, is a small island near Komodo island, East Nusa Tenggara, Indonesia. The island is famous for komodo dragons, giant lizards that can measure up to 3 metres (9.8 ft) long. Rincah is also populated with many other species such as wild pigs, buffalos and many birds.

Being less known and less visited than Komodo it is an excellent place to see the Komodo Dragon in its natural environment with fewer people to disturb them. Day trips can be arranged from Labuanbajo on Flores by small boat at the park headquarters.

The island's area is 198 square kilometres (76 sq mi).

Rinca and Komodo bracket a north-south passage between the Indian Ocean and the Flores Sea. Due to the large bodies of water and narrow gap, the waters between Rinca and Komodo are subject to whirlpools and currents in excess of 10 knots.

In June 2008, five scuba divers (three British, one French and one Swedish) were found on the Southern coast of Rincah after having been missing for 2 days. The group had drifted 20 miles (32 km) from where their dive boat abandoned them. They survived on shellfish and oysters.

Rinca island is composed of a silica-rich rock called rhyolite porphyry. The rhyolite contains large, perfect doubly terminated quartz crystals (lacking the prism faces), some of which are up to a centimeter long. The rhyolite is also rich in magnetite, which weathers out of the rock to form magnetite-rich sand on some of the beaches. In places, silica-rich groundwater has replaced the bedrock with chert. On Rinca, one can see fragments of worked chert lying around near the outcrops. These rocks are geologically distinct from the rocks found on islands to the east and west, which are more mafic in character.

If you want to see the big Komodo dragons, you should get to the park early, before 6:00 a.m. when the first tour starts. Even this early, the island is hot. You should dress lightly, and bring a lot of water. Before the tour starts, you can visit the little museum they have at park headquarters, where you can see an exhibit of the various rock types found on the island, and a display of all their poisonous snakes, of which there are a great many. You can also pet the many deer that hang out at park headquarters. The big dragons don't come into the park headquarters area, so the deer are safe there. You can also see a lot of the little Komodo dragons, the young ones, who must spend their first several years in trees to be safe from their elders, who would gladly eat them. Komodo dragons are cannibals who eat their own young, and even other adults when they can pull it off.

The tour is led by a couple of men from the park service. The men carry long, forked sticks, but say that their main protection from the dragons is the special rapport they have with them. They tell us that the dragon is called "Ora" locally, and they talk about their habits and behaviors. They used to bring a goat with them to feed to the dragons on the river bank where the lizards gather, but this practice has been discontinued.