Gili Trawangan, Lombok (26-30 Aug)

25 kms west of Bali and just off Lombok are the three Gili islands. This place is mostly about partying but I am here to unwind and maybe do some more scuba diving. The return transfer is 63€ which is quite a lot of money on Bali.

now I know why it is called fast boat

I stayed at Gili Trawangan which means Cave Island. About 80% of its population are Muslims and you hear the speakers calling for the evening prayer for hours. There are neither police nor cars on the islands and if you don’t wanna walk you can rent a bike or hop on to one of the pony-drawn carriages called cidomos.

cidomo

This time I went with the Lonely Planet’s recommendation and stayed in a nice bungalow just 3 mins off the main street.

I had to get up at 5:30h that day and after having arrived I took a nap and did some Internet and blogging in the evening.

main beach

I took the next day off chilling with the locals in the shadow showing them some riffs on the guitar. As usual my fingers hurt every time I touch this keyboard.

Walking around the Island takes about 1.5-2 hours and is well worth it. You shouldn’t really do it around noon cos the sun is burning relentlessly. Away from the houses you sometimes don’t see anyone for 20 minutes and if you want a beautiful beach for yourself the western part of Gili Trawangan is the place to go.

your own beach

I spotted a narrow path up the hill and hoped for a nice view from the top but all efforts were in vain. Highlight up there was a transmitting station and some goats. Never mind, the exercise climbing up there was good for me and it was in fact a shortcut back home.

view over Gilli Trawangan

Away from the tourist roads the environment is heavily polluted with plastics and cardboard boxes. Also worth mentioning is that all the beaches on Gili are covered with corals. Not sure if these dead corals are fairly new or if they have been there for ages. I hope for the latter.

I booked a snorkelling tour that takes you to three different places round the three little Gili Islands. The price was just 7€ and so I got a good look at the place before diving. Most of the corals are dead from either dynamite fishing or from el nino and the diversity sucked . Usually there is a myriad of fish around these corals but the place was almost empty. We did see several turtles, though.

Hence, I decided not to go diving there and so Tulamben was the only place. Initially I wanted to do much more but there is still Thailand to come.

On a side note: I got the most cruel sunburn of the decade on my back. Not sure why, maybe the sunscreen wasn’t waterproof. Anyway, checking out the following morning, lifting up my 20kg backpack and carrying it all the way to the ferry terminal sucked.

The boat was more than an hour late and couldn’t approach shore due to the low tide. So they had to move all the passengers and the luggage into a smaller vessel and ship’em on shore. Of course there was not enough room for all the passengers and so they had to do all that twice. By the time everybody was onboard we have lost another two hours and instead of 10:30h we commenced our trip back to Bali at almost 2 pm.

it was crowded on the way back to the fast boat

Having arrived there my luck continued. I got the emergency seat in my shuttle bus to Kuta and I couldn’t lean back and my bum felt numb after 45 minutes. Well, sometimes this is the way it goes. Just grin and bear it. At least the Nasi Goreng for dinner was excellent.