A week in Lombok

"Whatever you do," says the Lonely Planet's South East Asia on a Shoestring, "get the Perama boat to the Gili Islands to avoid running the gauntlet of menacing touts at Bangsal".

Except that this week, for some reason, all of Perama's boats are over on the other side of Lombok - no service running to the Gili Islands, sorry sir. Bugger! So we had to take the bus to Bangsal and face the fearsome mob of merchants... except there was no mob, no hassle - barely anyone there at all. We did have to wait 90 minutes before there were enough other people heading to Gili Air to fill the boat up, but for Rp 7000, (about EUR 50c), who cares? Not us.


The Gili Islands are three cute little blobs off the North West coast of Lombok. Not a lot goes on there, except for swimming, eating, and getting off your face on hallucinogens. We were offered a magic mushroom pizza within an hour of arriving, but politely declined... we're not hippies, thanks very much ;-)

We chose Gili Air cos it sounded like the nicest of the three. Gili Trawangan, the furthest west, is the most developed/touristy, and sounded to us like a sweaty disco nightmare. Gili Meno's in the middle and is full of mosquitoes. Our island was quiet. Almost too quiet, but it is low season here at the moment. This was the perfect place to start our Indonesian experience - totally relaxed, with plenty of time to learn about the food, the money, how much stuff costs and how bizarrely popular the "dark moon" psychedelic rave parties at Legend Bar are.

Favourite bits: Warung Munchies! The tastiest little spot for eating on Gili Air. Super nice food! Also the place where I discovered how much the price of beer has gone up here (from Rp 2500 to Rp 20000 - probably within a couple of years). Here's Debs noshing on the best tofu and vegetable soup ever:


Other good bits: we did a day trip on a little boat, snorkeling around the three islands. We saw turtles, Debs clung onto the outrigger and was sick 4 times, we fed bread to the cute little fish, we watched Dani (our guide) speargun an octopus to death, and we lamented the dreadful state of the coral, which has been dynamited/bleached to within an inch of its life. Shame.

Bad bits: showering in salty/brackish water for a week. Not nice, but it did provoke the best quote of the week from Debs: "I've got fat hair!"

All in all, a very relaxing week. Next stop, Bali!

Ben

Trust me, I'm your friend

We're in Indonesia! We entered the new and mysterious world of Asia at 17.30, with no Rupiah but luckily enough US Dollars to pay for our visas.

Challenge #1: Find an ATM.

This might seem a relatively easy task, in an airport, but we're not in Australia anymore, we're in Lombok. First off we tried to look like we knew what we were doing, traveler style, but it soon became apparent that there was no ATM in the arrivals lounge we were in, and no-where else to go except into the marauding masses of touts and taxi drivers awaiting our flights arrival. OK. Deep breath. This is why we're here, for the challenge. So, we asked the locals where the ATM machine is. Ans: "There isn't one at the airport, you have to go into Mataram by taxi" OK, this isn't really what we had in mind. Let's get a second opinion and ask the money changer (yep, pretty dumb, I know now). Ans: "No ATM here. You want to change money?" Mmh. OK, third option, go back into the airport and ask someone there. Bingo, there's an ATM about 100 yards away, in the other part of the airport.

Challenge #2: Get a taxi to Senggigi. Easy, non?

We wanted to be in Senggigi nice and early so we could get the ferry out to Gili Air first thing in the morning, where the ferry for the Gili islands leaves from (or so we thought). First off, the taxi driver tried to charge us 50,000 Rp then very generously offered to let us have it for 40,000 Rp after showing us printed 'proof' that the official cost, as dictated by the government should be 50,000 Rp. Luckily, I'm too tight to pay over the odds, which I knew was 30,000 Rp, thanks to some internet research, and Ben saw through the printed document ruse, after reading a book on how to negotiate at Deb's and Stu's house. We went into the street and got it for almost exactly 30,000 Rp on the meter. Bingo.

Lessons learned: Always come armed with as much info as possible, and get multiple opinions and try to extract the truth from a combination of answers. Lots of people here lie. Never trust something just because it's printed.

After a long day of traveling, we slept like logs, and were woken up at 5am by the magical sounds of the call to prayer from the local mosque. Here we go!

Debs