There's a village off the coast of Komodo built on stilts. Maybe fifty or sixty people live there in thatched huts rising up out of the water. It's a small village on a small island - give it a few more years and it won't even be that. The few folks who are left stay because they believe they are cursed, and to leave, well, that's not real­ly an option, that's not how the gods want things to work around here. So they stay. They stay on an island that's half desert and half jungle and completely inhospitable. They stay on an island that's home to 2,400 man-eating dragons with insatiable appetites and dozens of teeth and a bite that's something like twelve times as strong as a Rottweiler's.

It doesn't matter to them that Komodo dragons can swim, nor that they swam all the way over here from Australia sometime back when you could dog paddle across an ocean with­out being overrun by a steamship or an oil spill. It doesn't matter that just yester­day one of these fisherman lost half his leg to a dragon. That a dragon smelled blood or fish or whatever and it tracked him across half an island and down an impossible cliff and then to his house in the ocean built on stilts. It doesn't matter that the dragon's saliva contains more toxic bacteria per cubic measurement than just about anything but lion fish or king cobras. It just doesn't matter. He's a dead man. He's going to bleed to death and he's going to do this because the nearest hospital is in Singapore or Jakarta and both are a plane ride away and this guy can barely afford his shoes. On a good day, when all the fish are bit­ing and the sun shining and nobody has come to chomp on his leg, he can maybe earn three dollars. He lives on Komodo. He's just part of the curse.

You have to be a little sick to want to go to Komodo. The Arctic on top, Antarctica on bottom and Komodo in the middle. That's how I first heard it described. On the trip over we made a list of everything on Komodo that could kill us and everything that couldn't...and let's just say that the list of things that could was really long and the list of things that couldn't was as follows: butterflies. But I'm getting ahead of myself. To get to Komodo I had to start by getting to Bali and from Bali to Lombok, Lombok to Sumbawa, Sumbawa to Komodo.

Lombok, Sumbawa, Komodo. They don't sound like places that exist any­more. They're fairy tale places. Places on old maps. Places you'd go if you woke up one morning and needed a quest, and not just any quest, not a drive to New Jersey, get stoned, and lose a hundred dollars in Atlantic City quest, but a real quest. One with consequences.

When you get off the plane in Bima, the biggest city on Sumbawa, you go through an area about the size of a bath­room in a truck stop in someplace like Fargo, North Dakota. In that room are people checking papers and passports and people watching over the people checking papers and a few more people watching over them. Everybody wants a bribe and everybody has a gun. If you get out of the airport, you walk into a throng of taxi drivers. There are about fifty cars in Sumbawa and about thirty buses and everyone who has a car or a bus and needs a little extra cash - down here they all need a little extra cash - and, well, they all show up at the airport at 10:30 in the morning when the only plane that's going to arrive today arrives. So you walk out of the airport and every last one of them is in your face and your pocket and wants to drive you and carry you and it's too early and nearing 900 hundred degrees...and I run away. I duck into the coffee shop next door and all the hawk­ers - that's what they're called here ­ can't follow.

There's an old crone behind the counter who has two teeth and gnarled hands and God knows what else and she's gonna bring me a cup of coffee. Which she does, but then she leans down and whispers something in my ear and my jaw hits the ground. I can't believe I heard right, so I turn around and say, "What?!"

And she looks at me in her seventy­-some years of wisdom and says, "Back room sucky-sucky." She says it slowly so I understand.

We do, finally, get a cab from Bima to Sepi, which is the port town where we'll hire a boat to Komodo. Sepi is the town at the end of the earth. It's made from dust. We're dumped at the far end of town and two of us duck into the home of the local boat master to start negotia­tions, while two of us stay outside with the gear. The street is a dirt slash thick with mule carts and it happens fast, I mean seconds, until we're surrounded by a dozen of these guys who quickly figure out that we don't need their services, that we arrived via car and are leaving via boat and they aren't going to make any money today. So they're mad - mad at us or God or the government - I don't know, I don't think they know either. But we're here, and God and the government, well, neither have been around for a while. So they back their mules into us. Ornery, hot, flea-bitten, whip-beaten, pissed-off mules, smashing into us. I mean, like, fuck me.

Negotiations take four hours and we get ripped off. Suckers. They had us the moment we walked through the door. They had the only boat in town that could make it to Komodo. Sure, we could take the public ferry, a piece of shit boat on some very rough seas and a trip that should take two days made to last a week. Sure, we could do that, except the ferry just got back from Komodo and won't be heading out for another five days, which means a week in Sepi and a nother on the ferry and right now I'm just trying to live through the afternoon.

Here's the thing about boat negotia­tions in Sepi. You show up in this mean, old town and start arguing with strangers - I'm talking hot, hard arguing with strangers - and then you get on a boat with them and take a very long trip . These strangers don't look like you, don't talk like you, don't act like you - but you gotta make a decision: do I trust these guys or not? See, it's not just about money. The outer Indonesian islands are among the most heavily pirated seas in the world. So you decide - are you renting a boat from five guys trying to make a living or are they pirates who are going to slit your throat and take your cash and dump you overboard? It's no joke. There are four of us and between us we have enough money to feed this entire village, to feed every last man, woman, and child for something like two years.

The vessel looks like a cigarette boat made wrong, made from cheap wood and painted white to disguise this. The distance between varying islands is rela­tively short, but the ocean here is very deep. This means a lot of water moves through a little space and it's monsoon season so that water is continuously getting windblown and rained on and looks something like a stew pot in a New York soup kitchen. At one point we tie our luggage down and then we tie ourselves down and the boat is getting tossed side­-to-side so much so that the next day I have a bruise. A bruise from being tossed high in the air and caught and then going the other way and some time in the middle of all of this I'm ass-smacking into this bench on which I'm hypothetically sitting.

We first see Komodo at dusk. After bucketloads of thunder and chop comes this amazing sunset. The type of sunset that takes all your consciousness, every last gasp, until somebody points to these three hundred foot juts of rock risen tall from the ocean. Nobody tells us, but we know. Komodo.

We sail into night. We sail under a sky of ink and twinkle. All the way around to a little cove and it's there we have to decide: sleep on the boat or sleep on Komodo. See, Komodo is a state park, there's a ranger station and a few guest huts. The huts are nearly ten feet off the ground, but inside it's not the dragons you worry about, it's the rats. Rats gnawing through the walls, rats in your bed - we've heard the stories. The boat is just fine with us.

Our crew is Islamic and at 4:00 am everyone is supposed to rise for prayer call, but this morning nobody's facing Mecca; we're busy, all nine of us, busy squatting and shivering in a wooden box not much larger than a refrigerator while outside, drumming onto our open air boat, is the whole of the Indonesian monsoon season.

You want to get to Komodo early. The dragons are cold-blooded reptiles and need long hours in the sun to get up to speed. You want to get there before 6:00 am so you can hang out in safety while they're still waking and waddling but we have to paddle ashore in a small canoe that's unsteady in calm seas and today we're a little rain delayed. By 7:30 the park ranger - whose only income comes from fools like us coming over to kick him a few coins to see the dragons - isn't too happy.

Walk to the dragons and how long will you walk, how does one walk backward into time, how to measure those moments? Come to a dirty, arid plain just past the edge of a rainforest. Here, the sun does not shine it bakes. There is a fifty-foot pen in the center of it all. The pen isn't, like you'd suppose, to keep dragons in, rather this one's built to keep people in and dragons out. It's about four feet high and made from some flimsy sticks that might stop something man-eating and ferocious, something like a gnat with a hangover.

Komodo time follows its own rules. It is not calculated in minutes or hours or days, here there is no Greenwich mean, there is only life and death and the dragons are keepers of both. Here time can be measured in saliva. The dragons eat a lot of carrion. They'll surround a water hole and pretend to be logs. There are deer on this island, deer that need water. Certainly, they're not stupid deer, they know that the dragon-lying beside their water dish isn't a log, but what can they actually do? So they come early in the morning, at a time when the dragon can't move like lightening, at a time when time is on their side. What an amazing species – all the dragon needs is a taste, a scratch, a hint of wrath. The deer is then caught a world made from spit, a world of toxic bacteria, a point from which time can no longer move forward, from which it can only count down. Soon the deer will die from infection, because Komodo is a small island, because deer can’t swim all the way to Australia.

Yesterday, someone forgot to close the gate to the pen and a wild boar is now running fits inside. Our guide is a thin rail carrying a big stick. His hair is permanently slick with sweat. There’s a boar in the pen so he’s standing by the gate beating his stick, trying to lure it out, trying very hard not to get gored along the way. But we’re late and the dragons are already up and the boar doesn’t want to come out because not only can’t he find the door, but if he does bother to find the door, on the other side wait seven full-grown Komodo dragons long ready for breakfast.

To see them inert, lazy in the sun, it’s easy to believe them sluggish, dumb, satiated. Make no mistake, a dragon can be up and moving at 12 mph in less than a second. If they were a car and their acceleration constant, they could do 0 to 60 in 4.8 seconds and they are never, ever, satiated. They eat each other, their young, boar, deer, water buffalo, civet cats, dogs, chickens, goats, crabs, birds, snakes, snails, clams, monkeys and even porcupines. For a dragon to swallow a wild boar, it takes about seven minutes, for them to dismantle a writer from California – less than four.

So we stand in an arid plain on a forgotten island among the lizards knowing these lizards are not that particular – certainly they like boar better than human, but really, does it matter, it’s just breakfast and, anyway, where’s the boar gonna go? It’s our job to lure the dragons away, just slightly, to pique their interest, to free the boar and to run like hell into the pen, to close the gate behind, to say whatever prayers we know to whatever god will listen. But this is Komodo and the gods have long since gone home.

There are a few graves on Komodo, but I did not get the chance to see them. They are farther afield, places where people have come off the trail, come off the map, where they have gotten lost in a very final sense of the word. We stay on our little path and in the end, we do, actually, make it into the pen and we do actually make it off the island. In the end, we are not murdered by pirates or blown by aging whores; we do not get typhoid or malaria or cursed by witches or eaten by dragons. In the end, we return from the shadow of the curse, to a place where the gods still have a little pull.