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Published: March 11th 2010
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So after the exciting feats of Berastagi, the time had unfortunately come to leave the adventures of Sumatra behind, along with the beautiful landscape, and travel down to the beaches of the Gilli Islands where Lucy (another of my housemates from university) would be waiting. We estimated the journey would take us about 28 hours, our naively optimistic opinion was telling us that it shouldn’t be too bad... 36 hours later, and once again, we were wrong.
Phase one of the journey included another 2 hour ride on our favourite bumpy modes of transport - the public buses, with an exciting twist being that the aisle was so thin, you could barely move between seats sideways, ensuring that if you happened to be carrying a backpack, injuries were going to occur.
Next phase of the journey: standing in the middle of the hustling and bustling Medan, trying to barter a fair price for a taxi to the airport whilst the Mafia of the taxi world stood around laughing at us, making sure that the drivers rip us off. Meanwhile Tom has given a rupiah to a street kid playing a wooden banjo meaning that within minutes the
arguing is taking place within a banjo orchestra of children who proceed to chase us down the road when we eventually do get a taxi.
Phase three: the hunt for KFC commences, even though it’s been less than 2 weeks since our last Western meal the endless Nasi Goreng (i.e. fried rice and vegetables with a fried egg on top) has taken its toll and even Ash, the vegetarian, wants the familiar chips. Eventually we give up and resort to the standard Nasi Goreng and spend the remaining hours in the airport pondering some of the madder parts of Indonesian culture, like why there was a gentleman relieving himself in the urinals - that for some reason had been built in the ladies toilets?
Phase four: We arrive at Java airport about 11.30pm and look forward to a short kip in a corner before our flight to Bali at 6.30am, our plans are royally shattered when the authorities inform us that they shut the INTERNATIONAL airport down from 12pm to 4am and we would have to wait outside for the night. Being the queen of sleep; i promptly fell asleep for the next couple of hours on a
bench outside, whilst Tom was bored to death by an extremely annoying Canadian who was also stranded and Ashleigh met a girl who was travelling the world following the Rubiks cubes conventions/competitions. Interesting?!
Finally we arrive in Bali at 10am only to spend the next three hours sat on our bags in a shopping centre waiting for Lucy to show up. When she finally arrives, an older Chinese couple who speak no English approach her and start to laugh and wonder at her height to which she is miming back to them that they are so short she can barely see them. All in all, a not-so- good example of inter -racial PR.
Eventually after 2 more buses and a long ferry journey, we arrive at a hotel to sleep, 36 hours after we had set off. It may come as no surprise that at 7.30 the next morning we had each slept through our alarms and had missed our bus to the harbour where we should have been catching a boat over to the Gillis. After racing down to the travel agents, they agreed to send us by minibus. This part of the journey was fairly uneventful
as we drove through hills, where palm trees and rice paddies edged into beautiful yellow sand coves with tranquil turquoise waters. Only one difficulty was encountered, as the little bus attempted to chug up a hill and the boot flew open with all of our bags on the brink of rolling out. Once at the harbour we were herded over to the dodgiest looking boat ever. The bottom of the boat was filled with water from a leak; every other available bit of space was filled with all of the local women’s fresh produce from the mainland and most of the seats with the local women. This made climbing aboard with 20kg rucksacks a difficult process. The boat was tipping violently, you couldn’t step on the floor and had to manoeuvre around the women sat in the awkward positions. Once you eventually had yourself uncomfortably sat down, there was nowhere to put your feet in the boat, unless you were prepared to risk life and death by allowing your feet to be near the food. Lucy took the risk and rested her feet on top of a basket of bananas, not only was she shouted at in Indonesian but received
the death stare for a full forty minutes and had her feet slapped a couple of times. It was certainly an experience.
After arriving on Gilli T the biggest island, we spent the next few days; relaxing on the beautiful beach, enjoying the views across to Lombok, challenging Lucy and Ash to piggy back water fights - (for the record, as a team they were useless, but pure comedy gold,) snorkelling around the island and stealing other tourists snorkels to see the turtles that they had found. Ashleigh had read an article on Gilli T from one of the broadsheets before she came out describing it as ‘the next Ibiza.’ In our experience it was anything but, there were apparently three parties a week which meant a bar became a bar/club for the night and although fun I wouldn’t compare it to what I imagine Ibiza to be like. Instead we spent most evenings playing drinking games with some Australians and the locals who kindly introduced us to their potent rice wine and endlessly listening to the song ‘Welcome to my Paradise’ in the bars. One night, after one of the ‘parties’ and a few too many cocktails; we
decided to go for a swim and spent about three hours being amazed by phosphorescence - the luminous plankton, piling it onto Ashleigh’s dress, so that she looked as if she were covered in sequins. Oh happy days.
Next, we headed over to the smaller island, Gilli Air, where we chilled out for two days in our huts on the beach. Lucy began a relationship with the owners 3 year old son, she taught him how to look and act like Kanye West, whilst he returned the favour by eating all of her food at meal times and peeing under her hut. Unfortunately Lucy felt ill for the majority of our time on the island (this turned out to be typhoid! In hindsight, possibly due to Kanye West?), whilst Tom, Ash and I were conned into buying 8 disgusting cocktails when we had only ordered 4. Tom was then forced to drink at least 6.
After about 5 days of sampling the island life on both Gilli T and the incredibly chilled out Gilli Air we decided to head back to main land as Lucy was due to meet her boyfriend Paul for the first time in four
months. Meanwhile, Tom, Ash and I, ever in search of more pain, were keen to begin our next 30 hour journey down to Flores to see the infamous Komodo Dragons, with a brief stop en-route to play with the evil little monkeys by the side of the road.
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Gill Carr
non-member comment
The Gilli
Sounds a great place, rather an adventure to get there. How did Tom get on with all those women around! We are all getting very envious of the sun and heat weather here still very cold for middle of March, send us some of your sun xx