After I finished my last exam on November 30, Jon and I began our trek to Lombok to meet up with Steph and Olly in the Gili Islands for part two of our expedition. We began by flying to Bali and spending the night in Padang Bai. The owner of the hotel we stayed in picked us up at the airport at 11:30pm and drove us from Denpasar to Padang Bai (a long hour and a half drive at that hour). We were setteled into bed at 2:00am, and up five hours later to take a fast boat to Gili Trawangan where we hoped to catch a ferry over to Gili Air where Steph and Olly had reserved us a room. We arrived on Gili T ten minutes too late to catch the first ferry and ended up having to wait for just over five hours for the next one. I was unimpressed with this fact (we could have just taken a boat straight to Gili Air instead of transferring) but as Jon pointed out, there are worse places to be stuck for a couple hours.
Finally, we arrived safe and sound on Gili Air. Upon arriving at the harbour we discovered that the place we were staying, the Gusung Indah, was on the other side of the island, and required a ‘shuttle’ to the hotel (also known as a cidomo...or horse drawn carriage).
We got settled into our room and went for a walk on the beach as our friends were nowhere to be found. Let me tell you, it doesn’t matter how tired you are, walking along the beaches of Indonesia at sunset, hand in hand with your loved one is about as good as it gets. We met up with Steph and Olly that evening and had an amazing dinner of chicken and tuna kebabs and cocktails not ten feet off the beach. After a lot of visiting and catching up we headed to bed for the evening, and to our surprise we had some visitors in our room! We discovered some little bed bugs lurking in our headboard, waiting for us to slumber so they could suck on our blood. Upon informing management we were efficiently upgraded to another room (although he tried charging us more for the upgrade...we negotiated that if he charged us the same amount we would not use the air con). To their credit they were still working on cleaning out the room when we left four days later.
The rest of the weekend followed the same vein. Starting the day with breakfasts of fruit pancakes or omelettes and Lombok coffee, we snorkelled during the day and saw some of the best reef either of us have ever seen right outside our bungalows. We sat in the sun drinking fresh fruit juice and listening to our books on tape, relaxing and catching up on our vitamin D intake, retiring to the tropical cabanas when the heat was too much.
On our last day we all opted to go on a snorkelling tour, which was lovely. We saw sea turtles, lion fish, angel fish, HUGE vibrant coloured clams and fields of beautifully coloured coral. Some of it looked exactly like decorations on a playground it was so pretty! The weather was rainy (it is currently rainy season in Indonesia) so the trip was cut short and we were unable to see the ‘wall of turtles’ of Gili Meno, but just for the opportunity to see some different reefs it was well worth the 80.000RP (approx. $8 CAD) we each spent on the tour.
We ended our trip as we had started, with some pina coladas on the beach and went our separate ways in the morning.
Jon and I arrived in Senggigi, Lombok this morning at around 10:30am and ran around town looking for accommodation. We ended up taking the advice of a local who seemed nice and took at room at Hotel Ray, even though it was not recommended in the lonely planet. It had the benefit of being right across the street from the beach, but is a bit of a dive and probably not even close to worth the 100 000Rp we are spending for the night. It has the added charm of thin walls and a birthday party going on in the hotel next door, where the patrons have been singing Happy Birthday on karaoke for the past hour or so. Tonight will be our only night here, however, as we have booked a car for tomorrow for a few days so we can see the rest of the island at our own pace. Hopefully all goes well and driving on the left (wrong) side of the road comes easily after being surrounded by it for the past four and a half months. Then we have tickets booked on a live aboard boat to Komodo Island and back which will take five days. Then we will probably spend a few more days on the Gilis, and will start heading to Jakarta for our flight to Phuket on December 20.
This was a long one, so I won’t bore you any longer. We miss everyone back home and have been thinking of you a ton, especially as Christmas draws closer, and will try our best to keep up with blog posts as we make our way through this land of spotty internet access.
-Kaela and Jon
That was a lot to catch up on. What a varied adventure. Did you see any Komodo dragons?
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