Some well earned rest

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Feeling battered and bruised after some excersize climbing Rinjani I felt like I deserved some rest and was pleased to have the Gili's as my next destination.

It's pretty simple really. Three Islands; Air, Meno and Trawangan (Gili means island in Indonesian) which have reputations for family, couples and partying respectively. Air (pron "eye-r") the quietest and Trawangan the busiest though none of them are overrun.

First stop was Meno with the Canadian couple (Carolyn and David) from Quebec I hiked with and two other Canadian guys (Theron and Matt) I met on Rinjani. The place was great for relaxing with simple pleasures close to hand. After two days of being pretty much the only ones on the island (there were maybe 10people in total) enough was enough and we chartered a boat to take us snorkelling and then drop us on Trawangan for some life.

Trawangan had the perfect balance and we stayed there for three days. Playing football in the evening with the local guys was pretty much our only real activity, which was nice. We went to a party one night after sinking a bottle of rum and made tits of ourselves dancing stupidly no doubt.

The highlight was a wreck dive we did on an old WWII wreck. It's a japanese submarine hunter which got torpedoed out of the water. Only one company knows where it is and it's littered with cool stuff to see both natural and man made - like huge anti aircraft bullets all over the place. The dive is 45m so is done on nitrox and I did it as a nitrox introduction as I'd never done it before. You go down pretty quickly and I was having some problems breathing at first (it seems to happen when I haven't dived in a while - after all breathing underwater is hardly a natural instinct!) almost to the point of shooting to the surface but things settled down and I was fine after a while - I came up with loads of spare air.

I'll leave it there for the Gili's. I spent a long time there but didn't do a lot - just what I was looking for.

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Photos

Stormy weather
Actually the weather was pretty pefect most of the time. This was a view from Gili Meno.

Munchies
Eating pineapple and banana doughnut things from our porch next to the beach on Meno.

Practice for later days
Walking around the interior of the islands there is another side to life

Snorkelling
This kid came out on the boat wih us and dived around picking things up of the floor to show people that most people couldn't reach. He didn't even have fins either.

Excersize
At 5pm every night the three of us joined the local guys for a game of footy. Everyone is welcome to play