Gili and The Nice Kuta

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As we write this blog, we are only days away from the end of our tour of SE Asia. We have been traveling for 6 months and a handful of days (about two months more than we originally predicted), but we aren't quite ready to come home yet...though we're getting awfully close (which is both a very scary and very exciting thought). In 48 hours, we leave Indo to fly to Kuala Lampur, from where we'll continue on to London. We're planning on spending 3 days in London with our friend Jamie who we met in Vietnam, then are flying to Spain to spend two weeks with Bristol in Alicante. From there, the plans are still up in the air. We're hoping to do a short mini-tour of Europe (just a few weeks at most) to make our journey truly an "Around the World" trip!

So back to Indo. Hopefully Matt sufficiently detailed our time in Java and didn't leave out too much in his desire to be brief-and left you ready for one of my long-winded run-on blogs. After staying with Isak in Bandung, we arrived in Bali with only three weeks left on our visa (which we realized later we could have extended, but we had already bought our flights to KL and London). Our original thought was to blast through the three weeks and fit in as many places and do as many things as possible to finish the trip off with a bang. Then we stopped, and thought about it, and realized that all we really wanted to do was relax and take it easy. By this point we're tired of long bus journeys and all the unimaginable things that inevitably go wrong. So, instead, we decided to choose just a couple of places and laze the days away with a lot of Nong Krung (the Indonesian word for sitting around and doing nothing).

We skipped through Bali with just a night in Kuta to make arrangements for our travel to the Gili Islands. The next day we headed on to Gili Trawangan, a small island off the coast of Lombok (which is like the much quieter sister island to Bali). The book describes Gili T as social, but not trashy-which fits it perfectly. There are enough people on the island that you are constantly seeing new faces, but unlike the craziness of Kuta, it is a pretty chill scene. The trip there was of course the usual adventure that goes with booked tour travel (there were so many legs of the trip-think bus, ferry, bus, and another ferry-that we didn't want to do it ourselves), and the trip took the entire day when it should have only lasted a few hours. We arrived just after sunset, and I of course had a guesthouse in mind that I had read about as being fantastic, with one of the benefits being that it was on it's own beach away from all the crowds. Well, the privacy translated into a 40 minute trek with our backpacks about 2.5km south of town. And what we found was fine, but not fantastic. The owner was extremely friendly, but the room was full of holes just begging the mosquitoes to come in and it was definitely not worth what they were charging. Too tired to head back into town, we crashed for the night, and then after a pleasant breakfast sitting on our deserted beach the next morning we trekked back in search of new accomodations. After a bit of searching, we ended up finding a real gem...Pondok Sederhana. It wasn't super-chic like some of the places on the beach, but for about $7 a night we had a very clean room set in a nice tropical garden that even included breakfast and fresh plumeria flowers on our bed.

We spent four days on Gili T mostly just lying on the beach and settling into our new relax mode for Indo. Gili T is a pretty dry, deserty island, but has some gorgeous white sand beaches and crystal clear turqoise water. There are no cars and no motorbikes on the island (though you have to watch out for the horse drawn carriages that ply the "main drag" (a dirt pathway that follows the beach for about a kilometer through the center of "town".) The town has a few dozen restaurants and bars that all have platforms with pillows looking out to sea (perfect for a sunset Bintang). We spent one morning walking around the island, which took about two and a half hours including a number of stops to swim and cool off. Another morning we decided to snorkel out past the reef crest to try to find the "Manta Point" which we had seen advertised on dive maps at the dive shops on the island. We didn't find any mantas, but we found a pretty patch of reef and a 5 foot reef shark that sent me zipping back to shore (it's one thing to see a shark when you're on their level diving, but completely another when you're splashing around on the surface snorkelling and they're circling below you.)

Much to Matt's enjoyment, there was a perfect little right reef break just south of town. Our first afternoon we both went out, joining mostly a local crowd. I stayed on the inside with a few five year old Indonesians and didn't catch a single wave, which I'd like to blame on the board, but is really just my lack of surfing ability and inability to compete with the kids for the waves. Matt on the other hand had a great session and caught some of his most fun waves of the trip. The next afternoon Matt paddled out again, while I remained behind on the beach to take photos, but the swell had dropped and the waves were so small they were un-surfable.

On our last day, we decided to check out another island, so we hopped on the morning shuttle boat over to Gili Meno. Gili Meno was even quieter and less crowded than Gili T, and after a quick circumnavigation of the island we easily found a deserted beach. For lunch we found a great local place that was set on one of the prettiest beaches either of us had ever seen, and spent the rest of the afternoon napping on another of the platform-thingys with pillows on them (that is the best name Matt and I can come up with-you'll just have to look at the picture to see what we're describing).

We could have spent weeks in the Gilis, but we're so used to spending just two or three days in a place that after four we were getting a bit restless. We packed up our stuff and headed back to mainland Lombok. We made our way to Sengiggi, where we combed the main strip haggling over car rental prices until we finally found a place that would rent us a Jimny (a little Suzuki jeep-like car) for $10 a day. We threw our bags in the bag seat and headed off in style (well, it felt like style after our usual very cumbersome affair of two people and three backpacks on a motorbike, but was really more of a rattling, clunkety-clunk stroll out of town.) Our next destination was Kuta-the Lombok Kuta, not the Bali Kuta, which are two very very different places. I like to think I'm pretty good with maps, but having a decent sense of direction doesn't really matter when there are no street signs and the roads are a maze of one-way roads with motorbikes zipping in every direction. So, we inevitably ended up on some dusty, pot-hole filled road in the middle of the countryside and with the main highway nowhere in sight. Luckily, after our week in Bandung, we were now armed with a decent Bahasa Indonesia vocabulary-decent enough-and after many "ke mana Kutas"? we wound our way through the back roads and eventually popped out on Lombok's version of a main highway (the government has entirely ignored this island's road system and it is sadly in such bad condition that even after all the places we've been on this trip, Lombok wins hands-down for the worst roads ever.) We stopped for some lunch at a little warung on the side of the road and were joined by every Indonesian in the town who spoke at least five words of English and wanted to practice them on us. The rest of the town just crowded around outside and peered in the windows at the two Bulehs (white people).

We arrived in Kuta by mid-afternoon and took advantage of having a car to really shop-around before settling on a guesthouse. We decided to go with Surfer's Inn. Every place we looked at was about 100,000 rupiah (a little less than $10) including breakfast, but Surfers definitely had the atmosphere to go with the room. There was a great central area with a pool and a tv that showed surf videos. Everyone there had about five boards with them and it was definitely the surfers hang out. Kuta itself is sort of surfer central and most of the surfers there were pretty good. It took us a bit to figure the place out, but after combing the coast a few times in our Jimny (and the first of our many car adventures/bungles...too be told later), we finally found all the breaks. Because of the time of year, Kuta beach itself didn't actually have any waves. Pretty much everyone went out at a break called Seger's reef, one of the few places that is good in a small swell, and it was crowded. It looked like Swamis on a Sunday morning. There were two other breaks south of Kuta at Gerupak, Insides and Outsides. To get to them you had to rent a boat for a short jaunt across the bay. North of Kuta were a few more breaks...Air Guling, Mawun and Mawi.

After checking out all the breaks every morning, Matt decided that he just wasn't feeling the waves there (and the crowd) and so instead we took advantage of having a car and explored the southern coastline. What we found was bay after bay of gorgeous, white sand beaches and water with varying shades of turquoise. At almost all of the bays we found few to no other tourists and instead enjoyed playing with the local kids. With our basic Bahasa Indonesia, we were able to teach a group of kids how to snorkel and enjoyed watching as they put the masks on upside down and submerged the snorkels entirely under water. We also found an incredible restaurant, Ashtari, on the cliff above Kuta beach. For the first time in months we enjoyed a California-style meal (think homemade wheat bread and tahini dressing). From the deck of the restaurant we could see for miles down the coastline.

On our first morning of exploration, we ventured a little too far onto the beach with our jimny and ended up getting stuck in the sand. Matt's too used to driving his truck which has all these fancy things like locking rear-wheel differential and hadn't quite adjusted to the delicateness of our $10 a day rental car. After about 45 minutes of digging the tires out and trying all sorts of Baja-learned tricks like rocks and boards under the tires, we had only gotten ourselves in deeper. So, we went for help. We stopped at the first house we came upon, which was only a few hundred yards down the beach, and found two young boys lounging out front. We once again put our Bahasa Indonesia to use and finally convinced them to go get their father because we had a "no good car" and "needed help". The father came out of the house and decided that his two young sons (they were about 10) were manly enough help us on their own and sent them with back down the beach to our car. Luckily, on our way back, a car full of Brits on their way home from surfing passed us and happily jumped out to help give us a push. So, with the three Brits, two young Indonesian boys, and Matt pushing (I got to drive), we were quickly out of the sand and back onto the road.

After almost a week in Kuta, we had explored every bay nearby at least a couple of times and were ready to move on to find new beaches. We decided to make our way back to Sengiggi the long way, where we had to return the car, by way of the coast. The map showed a pretty decent sized highway, but what we found in actuality was a road that was almost 4WD worthy and riddled with potholes bigger than our jimny. After a bone-rattling day (and many gorgeous beaches later) we finally made our way back to civilization by sunset and found a decent guesthouse just a few hours south of Sengiggi. The car had surprisingly survived (even after I drove it into a pothole so deep the car landed on the frame during the 15 minutes I tried driving to give Matt some relief), but we were beat and not ready to brave the roads in the dark. The next morning we woke up bright and early planning to return our car by the 11am deadline. However, our good intentions were not successful. Car adventure number 2: as we started rolling down the driveway Matt realized we had a flat tire-luckily not on the deep-pothole side, so it wasn't my fault! We didn't think it would be much of an issue-Matt's changed his fair share of them and I got the requisite lesson from my dad when I turned 16 and got my first car which I figured would set me up pretty well to play support-crew. Well, as we quickly learned, nothing goes as planned in Indonesia. First, we realized the jack that came with the car was broken. One of the kids from our guesthouse found us another from one of the neighbors, but that didn't work either. Then we realized that one of the bolts that keeps the spare attached to the car was broken, and thus wouldn't come off with the tools we had. So, after an hour or so of trying to fix it on our own, we finally gave up and drove down the street to one of the neighbors who, along with an entire crowd of onlookers, finally fixed it. He, of course, wanted a little something for his help (nothing is free in this country), and so finally two hours after we had set out we finally left.

We made it back to Sengiggi, where after a small argument with the car people about their bad jack we succeeded in getting some money back (all the credit goes to Matt on this one!). We settled in for one last night on Lombok before returning back to Bali. The Lonely Planet describes Sengiggi as having an absolutely stunning beach. We didn't find it to be so stunning. It was literally covered with locals picnicking and food vendors supplying the massive quantities of food being consumed. Trash was piled high and the water was gray and muddy from all the people splashing about. We luckily found a bit of empty sand and some shade in front of one of the resorts and watched the mayhem from afar.

The next morning we joined up with our tour/transport company in Mataram for the bus/ferry/bus ride back to Kuta, Bali. It was another long day of travel that took twice the amount of time it should have. However, on the ferry ride we met a nice Spanish/Polish couple and had fun spending a few hours practicing our Spanish in anticipation for our upcoming trip to Spain.

Despite our car troubles, it was awesome getting to explore and getting to avoid the hot, sticky buses. Lombok was one of the most rural, beautiful places we have visited on our trip. It's not going to last long however. There is a huge development planned for Kuta and an international airport is opening within the next year. The opportunity for investment is perfect though-an opportunity which Matt and I entertained long enough to take a trip with a real estate agent out to see a piece of property one random afternoon in Kuta, and then had to sadly give up when we realized we had miscalculated the exchange rate and a hectare wasn't actually $350 as we thought but really $35,000. Oh well. If anyone is interested, we've got pictures! Guess we'll just have to go back as tourists and not property-owners.

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Photos

Gili T
Looking at the island from the mainland of Lombok

Pondok Sederhana
Our nicer room in town

Matt surfing the Gili T wave
This was the second day he went out and the swell had dropped...a lot!

view from our lounge platform
...on Gili Meno

Our First Jimny
the one with the flat tire and the very loud rattle

Beach at Mawun
one of the many gorgeous bays along Lombok's southern coastline

the road we got stuck on
you decide-does it look like we'd get stuck or no? Obviously Matt thought not, but he was wrong.

View from Ashtari Restaurant
looking south along the Kuta coastline

Matt fixing the tire
...or at least attempting to with our broken tools

The platform with pillows *thingy*
eating breakfast at our first place on Gili T

Beach at Pondok Dewi Sri
The beach we had all to ourselves

Indo platform
perfect place for a break on our trek around Gili T

Comments

[Aunt Pat]

keep trekking
WOW!! I'm amazed every time I read your blogs! I think you're on to something....a travel book! Your adventures have so much to offer and I feel like a travel companion while reading, thanks. Enjoy Europe, I'm sure this part of your trip will be quite different. Keep us posted. Love you!