Gili Air and Pony Love

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Having tidied up our room and paid our bill, we left the large suitcase with the hotel for safekeeping till we return to Ubud in 3 to 4 weeks. Ubud has been a very good place for us but are decision to leave now is an impeccable one. Yesterday two elderly German women moved in upstairs and spent a good portion of the night rearranging furniture to suit their Bavarian sensibilities. This morning their bedding flew from their balcony like a Putzfrauian flag urging us onwards. The crowds in Ubud never really picked up while we were there. By our last day there the main drag looked like the street scene in ‘High Noon’ at 11:55 AM. I thought I saw a tumbleweed or two roll by.

A note to interested parties on inter-island travel in this area of Indonesia. To get from Bali to the Gilis there are a couple of ways to skin the cat. There is the $15 way, which involves busing to Pandabang on Bali’s East Coast. From there you take the public ferry (resembles a tramp steamer but not as nice) to Lembar, the western port of Lombok, from there you take the public bus to Sengigi to the north where you arrange a boat to the Gilis. Cheap but very time consuming and if you have to stay in Sengigi for a night it will erase any advantage in cost. The other way costs $35. Perama buses you to Pandabang where they have a private boat take you directly to the Gilis dropping you at your isle of choice. You are fed and coddled the entire way. Or there is something called the ‘Fast Boat’, which involves wearing crash helmets and clinging to the side of a high speed cigarette boat as its twin Mercs launch you breathless across the waves. The problem is that this boat sucks so much gas that the operators won’t run it unless they sell a certain number of tickets, which they do not tell you when you make your booking. Odds are that during low season your ship will not sail. We chose coddling.

We splurged on a real taxi to take the bags and us to the Perama bus terminal which is a small slab of concrete with an attached ticket booth. From these cramped confines you can embark on journeys all over Indonesia. Timing is a virtue at Perama as all buses must reach the terminals on schedule to ensure smooth connections between buses. Most of the time the terminals are good locations for serious nappers. At connection time a half dozen vehicles are parked bumper to bumper. Our bus is about seventy-five percent full. Mostly western twenty-somethings all headed to the Gili Islands. Sunglasses, faded Billabong shorts, backpacks. It is not until they speak or you spy a clenched paperback that you can get a feel for their native lands. When we arrive at Pandabang Pier we have 45 minutes to kill in a small restaurant before the boat departs. The eatery is run by a tough little Balinese woman who takes our orders expeditiously and barks them in the same manner to her nervous looking staff of female assistants. The food hits the table quickly and is consumed slowly. 45 minutes is a port town can be a long time to kill. Once in Piraeus, Greece, Karen and I watched Marc Horin kill 90 minutes with a single bowl of Tripe soup. A travel record not bested to date.

When we re-board the bus three young Australian males join us with surfboards in tow. The barefoot Aussies sport shades, beads, baggy torn crack exposing swimsuits and little else whilst custom tailored zippered fabrics encase their boards as tightly as a doting mother dresses her two year-old son on snow day. Five minutes later we arrive at the pier where the first vessel we see is a wooden cargo barge parked at the small jetty. Small dark men work furiously wrapping a large blue tarp over the cargo of large bags of cement. Our Perama ‘coordinator’ watches them at work patiently. Never knowing what to expect when traveling but always being prepared for the worst I begin to mentally pick my seat looking for a cement bag in the shade. Perhaps one comfortably leaning against a bulkhead, offering back support and convenient access to the deep blue bathroom. Suddenly the barge pulls away leaving me elated but simultaneously depressed. After all, the next vessel could be worse. While we await our mystery ship our fellow passenger stand or sit under an awning in a tightly packed group. Strangers in a strange land circling the cultural wagons. Our numbers make us too large to ignore and the hawkers start to play ring around the money. A man with a gym bag filled with counterfeit designer sunglasses, a woman with brightly colored Hawaiian shirts (one island’s as good as another), another selling T-shirts and another beaded necklaces. They pitch and move, pitch and move in a Virginia Reel of commerce. As we spot our tender heading for the jetty the hawkers are ignored and people fidget with their collection of backpacks, knapsacks, fanny-packs, surfboards and American Touristor-like behemoths that are more steamer trunk than suitcase.

It is clear that the tender will not hold all on one trip and inevitably everybody wants to be first onboard. Why the sudden need for speed I do not understand as I can see our empty ship about a hundred yards away and it has a capacity of 150-200 passengers. There are only 25 of us boarding. I spy a sixty-something couple join the fray and by some miracle of fate they make line positions numero uno and due. The pitching tender is slightly lower than the jetty’s step so timing is essential in boarding. As the craft rises up you step in and steady yourself as the deck drops under your flip-flops. Our elderly champion fails the balance portion of the travel SAT’s and crumples to his knees like a poorly constructed origami figure augmenting his Bali souvenir collection with a half dozen scrapes. He murmurs to his female companion/ wife/ significant other in French. I feel better. I mean, he sounded OK.

Bags and bodies eventually all make it to the ship intact though our tender is now so overloaded water creeps over the bow with every dip. Once onboard the big boat the kids race for the sundeck where they find a collection of chairs, benches and a large sandbox for sunbathing. A movable beach as it were. Measuring 6 by 8 feet I have questions about its practicality. Downstairs in the enclosed cabin the elderly French couple, Karen, I and a young amorous Indonesian couple camp out on the upholstered reclining airplane style seats conveniently adjacent the snack bar. As crew members pass around a bin of fried banana tempura our 80-foot diesel pulls anchor and heads north along the coast of Bali, pitching in the 4-foot swells. The seas are dotted with the multi-colored triangular sails of small single-man fishing boats. As we pass through the cloud of kites every fisherman offers us a wave and a smile. Bali falls behind and we are able to fully grasp its grandeur. From a distance it looks like a great pyramid surrounded by low blue dunes. What a wonder it must have been when sailors first caught sight of this Giza floating miles from home.

Karen and I settle in the first row of seats breaking out the essential supplies of paperbacks, journals and hard candy for the four-hour cruise. As we follow the curve of the coast the seas calm. I ascend for a look topside and find the beach populated with 4 milky white sunbathers and the rest of the kids stretched out on benches for a rocky snooze. Our teen-aged basketball team sized crew lounges on the bow playing a battered guitar. To our right we can just make out the hazy outline of Lombok, an island as large and prominent as Bali though less well known. At the halfway point the crew puts out a spread of noodles, veggies and fruit. The kids flood down like Sam’s Club patrons at free sample time. Behind us the sun begins to set. Ahead we can just make out the twinkling bar lights of the Gilis. The freshly fueled kids re-crowd the upper deck, necks straining forward like whalers sorting through a pod of potential harpoonees for that is how the Gilis appear from a distance. Three large humps of sand in a row. First is Gili Trawangan (hereafter referred to as Gili T.) the party island. From our location we can hear the pulse of bar music across the water. Beating drums send out the promise of cold beers, hot dates and soft sands to pass out on. The kids salivate in Pavlovian response. Next is Gili Meno, the smallest and most sedate of the group with a mere 300 natives. East of Meno is Gili Air which is our destination. Party if you want to and chill if you don’t. The middle-aged American dream. I look at the pile of passenger luggage where the crews’ guitar lies atop, looking forlornly at the surfboards’ duds.

We pull into Gili-T where a waiting tender lightens our load by eighteen passengers and three sharp looking surfboards. In a rush to get off the boat the elderly Frenchman smacks his forehead on a beam and starts bleeding admirably. Rather than pause for a look he slaps a handful of paper napkins on the wound and battens it all down with a baseball cap. Yet another remembrance. Bon voyage mon ami. It is almost dark now as we cruise less than a thousand meters to Gili Meno where five more abandon ship. Karen and I have the ferry to ourselves for the short ride to Gili Air. A forty passenger tender takes our single bag and us into the beach where we pitch our shoes for the wade onto dry sand. Rebooting ourselves in the near dark we are approached by pony-cart drivers asking us our destination and quoting their fares in rapidly descending figures. Sometimes it pays to remain silent. For $2 we secure a pony and a teenage driver with an eight year-old assistant thrown in on the deal. We clip-clop down a sandy path in now total darkness. The ponies have heads but no suffix lights. Our Gili Connestoga is running blind. A word on Indonesian electricity. They have it but they don’t have a lot of it. You’ll never find a light bulb here above forty watts. A modern home here only has a six Amp service. I suspect that if you were to make your way into an Indonesian power plant you would find a collection of hamster wheels tended to by a kindly Muslim engineer with a bucket of carrot fuel in hand. There are no motor vehicles allowed on the Gilis. So it’s either foot, bike or pony cart to get around. The resulting silence is deafening. The new moon sky is awash in stars.


After many bumps to our rumps we pull up to the Coconut Cottages Hotel. We chose this one from the guide based on descriptions and recommendations from fellow travelers. The room is clean, has a nice porch, hot water, landscaped setting and a comfortable bed ominously encased in mosquito netting. For this little piece of heaven we pay $19 a night including breakfast. Our next door neighbors are Morgan and her husband Obie from Juneau, Alaska. (I did the Obie Won thing which didn’t go over very well.) No rabbits this time but our room does come with a cat and her three kittens. We catch dinner at the hotel’s restaurant and hit the hay looking forward to a recon in the sunshine.

I woke at 5 and headed to the beach 50 yards away. To the east I could see Lombok’s sacred mountain Gunung Senkereang, an active volcano standing 9,000 feet high. The sun rose behind it creating dazzling rays of golden light that appeared to emanate from the rock itself. Sacred indeed. As the sun rose I could see multitudes of brightly colored fish in the crystal clear reef waters. After Karen joined me we walked the entire East Side of the island which took all of 25 minutes. The Gilis are no more than smudges of sand in the Java Sea. Gili T., the largest of the three is only one mile in length. Gili Air is a kilometer long with all of the hotels located on the East Side. A sandy path circles the perimeter. The ‘town’ adjacent to the south port has a few shops, hotels and a mosque. A business owner is any native with a shack and $20 worth of merchandise. Penny candies and flowerpots are the big sellers. The religion here is Muslim and the citizens adhere to Islamic law with varying degrees of enthusiasm. You can’t find barbecued pork but there’s plenty of beer. There are thirteen hotels on the island ranging from A/C rooms with pool operations down to thatched boxes on stilts with squatters for a toilet. There are a dozen eateries specializing in fresh fish. And it is fresh, as the fishing on the reef here is remarkable. Red and Black Snapper, Grouper, Kingfish, Druamma, monster prawns, squid. It’s all very, very good and very inexpensive. The other night we dined on a high priced 4-pound Red Snapper grilled with chili sauce, served with rice and vegetables. It would have fed four people and we paid $12 for the feast. Our average meal cost here is $6 or less for the two of us.

And now Gili Air’s best side. The people. This island is a Woodstock love fest. There are only 1,000 people here and everybody knows everybody. Hell, they’re probably all related. No matter where you go everyone says hello. The children here wander the island in groups, safely playing in what has to be one of the world’s largest backyards. They wear shorts, T-shirts and big Huckleberry Finn straw hats that frame their dark faces like halos. We watched a beautiful man with long hair and a sarong tied as a sash playing and laughing with his toddler in the evening waves. These people are so laid back they’re horizontal. During our explorations we cut through one of the small shack tracts that house the common folk here. Boxes on stilts, containing ragged happy people who always greet you with a smile and a hello. Remember that ‘Twilight Zone’ episode where there were two small kids whose wealthy parents who were on the verge of divorce? Their stately home had a pool that the children could dive into as an escape hatch and when they resurfaced they found themselves in the fishing hole of a Mark Twain world populated with Hucks, Becky’s and Toms. All cared for by a wise and loving ‘Aunt Polly’. A woman who never judged but only listened. Gili Air is the adult version of Aunt Polly’s swimming hole. There are no police or government entities. The island is ruled by the village elder whose attitude is ‘Don’t bother me unless it’s really important’, and he is seldom bothered.

Our favored point of ocean entry is the Go Go Beach Club. I suspect the names selected for bars here are plucked from 60’s television shows, the signal waves of which have only recently fallen upon these distant shores. We stake a claim on a thatched pavilion next to the sea. A low Japanese style table surrounded by large comfortable pillows furnishes our new pad. When you need a drink or some food you call the combination waiter, bartender, cook, snorkel instructor, best buddy over. Nobody bothers you unless you’re in need of bother. Stay as long as you like. Do as little or as much as you like. Spend nothing or leave your wallet. At lunch I discovered that I had forgotten in a senior moment to bring my money from the room. I was about to give our digital camera to the restaurant owner for collateral until I returned when a young Aussie and his girl offered to pay the bill for us. Then the owner jumped in to say don’t worry about it. Gili Air is that kind of a place.

“Why can’t we all just get along?”
Rodney King

Just off the beach is a nice reef populated with a myriad of fish species and large green sea turtles to keep you company. Karen met Nemo here. The turtles swim fifteen feet below you as you snorkel above them in water so clear you think you’re flying in formation with the reptiles. As they slowly paddle they keep their necks stretched and their eyes turned towards you. Plumbing the depths of one turtle’s sage peepers I wondered what secrets of the seas I could learn from him. At about that time I flew into the channel marker-buoy and scared the wise one away. The sunsets are awe-inspiring events. As the sun sinks below the clouds and just above the horizon, horizontal shafts of gold pierce the water and reflected by the coral upward turn the water’s surface into a display of such intense color that the sea appears to thicken with splashes of oil paints. I think of the sea turtles and neon colored fish swimming through the forest of light beams below. The same rays illuminate the island of Lombok and it’s three volcanoes, Midasizing them into a gold nugget landscape.

Catch some sun, take a snooze in the shade or have a bite. It is the most relaxing and tranquil place I have ever visited in my life. These people have a passion to hang together, sit and do nothing but look at the sea for hours. They’re in love with it. And why not? It’s their grocery store, artist, music maker, swimming pool, laundry facility, bathtub, entertainment center and teacher. It’s Mom.

Note: Pics are smaller as Internet here is satellite only and loads run at glacial speed.

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Photos

Volcanoes
Sunrise over Lombok from Gili. Volcanos. You gotta love em'

All Alone
The scene just before arriving in Gili Air. We are the only smart tourists left on the boat.

Regatta
Some of the hundreds of fishing boats we spied along the way.

Oh Cabana Boy!
Enjoying the fruits of travel.

Pony Cart
Aren't they adorable?

Looking for a fare
Pony cart deadheads back to the port.

Tom and Huck
A day of fishing is better than... Kids here build miniatures of their Dads' models.

Make Mine Pineapple
Karen prefers watermelon juice after a snorkel.