We were prepared for the chaos at Bangsal Harbour, all the blogs we had read warned us of hawkers who would try and fool us into paying more for the trip to Gili Air. What weren’t prepared for was a guy yelling in our face next to the ticket office, becoming ruder when we brushed him off to talk to the lady inside the ticket booth. The most absurd thing was when he slowly read his t-shirt “Ripcurl… it’s the boat company, means I work on the boat” he sneered condescendingly as if we hadn’t heard of the world-wide surfing brand it actually represented.
The tickets cost 16 rupiah (less than £1) each and it seemed we were the final passengers they needed as the whistle was blown as we walked from the ticket office and everyone waiting formed a rough line, ready to walk into the sea and climb onto the boat… not an easy thing with 14kg on my back. The centre of the boat was rammed with produce and what seemed to be six air-conditioning units, we all had to squish together round the edge of the boat with no space to spare. At least the ride was fairly quick, only 20 minutes passed before it was time to awkwardly put on our packs again to jump back into the sea and wade to the beach.
I’d been warned about the Gili Isles, even had people suggest not to go there, all because of the horses. As an avid equine enthusiast islands full of horses might seem like paradise, but it was the poor care of the horses used to pull carts and carriages that I was warned about. Luckily it seems that husbandry of these horses has improved in the past few years and this is down to Horses of Gili a not for profit organisation based on the largest of the Gili isles. With access to proper tack, feed and clean water the lives of the hard working horses has improved but it’s still not perfect. This is the reason why we chose the smallest of the Gili’s to stay on, we’d be able to easily walk to our accommodation and wouldn’t have to rely on horse power to get us there.
Gili Air - which translates to the very imaginative “small island water.” is a tiny 1.5km by 1.5km island just of the north west coast of Lombok. It was also our home for the next 5 nights. Most of our days were spent hiding in the shade, with the occasional dip in the pool before choosing a good spot to watch the sunset from. We also walked around the entirety of the island many times, somehow finding new places tucked away down small dirt roads. We also managed to find quite a few good restaurants to eat in, our favourite was Lockdown Kitchen.
A delightfully small restaurant with only 3 tables, Lockdown kitchen cooked the best Indonesian food we had for the entire trip and despite the amazing presentation, it was one of the cheapest meals too coming in at under 100,000 rupiah (£6.40ish). I had Nasi Kebuli; Cinnamon, clove and coconut rice studded with raisins, accompanied by a range of vegetarian dishes, sweet fried tempe, veggie fritters and sambal were just a few. It was so good I went back the next day and had it again.
For cocktails Mowies was definitely our go to, after feeling a bit ill from local spirit cocktails from a cheaper beach bar, we decided to go fancier. I had the Karma kolada (Rum, coconut water, coconut flesh, pineapple, chai spices) it was so soo good. Ben went for the Endless Summer (Toasted coriander infused Tequila, pineapple, chilli, lime) a bit spicy for me but he thought it was delicious.
To be fair, we only had one bad meal in the whole 5 days on the island and we really should have expected it. Empty restaurant? Yup. Weirdly broad menu? You bet! Ordering a Mexican dish that it turns out they don’t have all the ingredients for? How did you know! What makes things worse is that they forgot about it so it was over an hours wait for nearly inedible food.
That’s enough about food and drink, let talk about snorkelling instead.
We’d been burned before on snorkelling trips - Thailand in particular comes to mind with us all being packed into a boat like sardines in a can, the snorkelling gear old and dirty. This time couldn’t have been more different. This time we had the boat all to ourselves. Booked through our hotel for 950,000 rupiah in total, we were picked up at 9.30am and led to the boat. From here we all ineffectually tried to push the boat out of the sand and further into the sea for a while before the captain and our guide ushered us into the boat and got us out to sea.
The sea was rough, but never-the-less we headed off towards Gili Meno where we would be snorkelling. I’ll spare you the complete blow by blow but confirm that it was amazing. We found it quite hard to navigate the flippers and Ben had a habit of falling into the side of the boat when disembarking but all this was forgotten when our guide repeatedly led us to turtles. There is something magical about swimming with turtles out in the middle of the ocean - I feel like we’re not exploiting them this way, they could easily swim away when they’re done with being with us. I have to admit that we found snorkelling quite hard work and after swallowing quite a lot of sea water on our third go we were happy to head to Gili Meno for a quick refreshing drink before heading
back home rather than to the fourth snorkelling site.
All in all, it was a wonderful day and yes it was a bit crowded where we were first dropped off to see the underwater statue off Gili Meno's coast but after that it sometimes felt like we had the whole sea to ourselves. It was also amazing having a guide come into the water with us, not only to help spot the turtles and lead us to the best coral for fish watching but to help us find the boat again as we never got back on where we jumped off.
From what we heard back in Lombok the Gili's were thriving and although they certainly have higher rates of tourism than Lombok currently does it wasn't quite a rosey as we'd been told. Coronavirus and the world wide lockdowns certainly had an impact, leaving abandoned villas and hotels across the island, some locked away behind fences and some out in the open with nature slowly reclaiming them.
The worst thing about our time on Gili Air was leaving, I don’t mean that in a “it was so wonderful we never want to leave” kind of way, it was just an unnecessarily awkward series of events.
Firstly, on the day it was more expensive than we’d previously been told, that was fine it was going to take us all the way from Gili Air to Ubud in the middle of Bali, a fairly long trip.
Secondly, it didn’t leave when it was supposed to. We all spent quite a bit of time on the jetty, waiting to see if local rulings would change, meaning we could get the fast boat from Gili Air without having to first go back to Lombok - no surprises that after 45 minutes of waiting we were heading off to Lombok.
Thirdly, when we got off the fast boat in the harbour in Bali, the guys from the shuttle company hurried us into the carpark… where we were told it was going to be at least 2 hours till the shuttle left and that we’d be the last stop on a 2 hour plus journey. BUT… they’d be happy to sort us (and the Belgium couple with us) a shared taxi for only 150,000 Rupiah per person. This was of course on top of the 900,000 Rupiah that we’d paid per couple in the first place! We said no and decided to band together to convince a taxi driver to take us there for 250,000 altogether.
So our time in Gili Air was over and it ended how it began… with people from boat companies trying (and succeeding this time) to rip us off.
We spent our last four days in Indonesian in the town of Ubud. Although it was set up for tourists, with bougie breakfasts (milk & madu), beautiful local food in the nearby paddy fields (Sweet Orange Warung) and relaxing balinese massages… it seemed too artificial to us. Off every main street was the same “arts market” filled with cotton kimonos and badly made shirts. Which ever direction we walked it seemed the same, as if the town had just been copy and pasted over and over again. Even the famous ridge walk wasn’t that impressive to us. The Palace, although beautiful can be easily seen within 5 minutes and I wouldn't put it on a must do list either.
I should stop being so negative a focus on the highlights. Meandering past the monkey forest on the way to the night market was pretty cool, plus I enjoyed our wander through the paddy fields, getting lost and accidentally ending up in a fancy resort. Of course, treating ourselves to a massage was pretty sweet and that I would highly recommend. Perhaps the issue is, once again, that without easy transport to get to the spectacular views around Ubud there just wasn’t much for us there.
So maybe when we're older, wiser and have more than one driving license between us, we’ll revisit Indonesia but for now we’ll have to accept that it’s just not for us.
On to the next great adventure…. Trip date : Oct/Nov 2022 Last stop: Lombok Next stop: Auckland, NZ
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