Medan Feel So Good

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We arrived back in Medan on Wednesday night to visit the hospital which was spectacular, and looked just like a fancy American hospital you see in films. We were seen straight away and Susie was given a course of antibiotics and would feel better in five days- yay! Instead of a taxi queue outside of the hospital, there is a hospital official organising tuk tuk rides for cheap prices.

We arrived back at the hotel and hung up all of our wet clothes, as the climate in Berastagi made it impossible for them to dry. We enjoyed a long lie the next morning and treated ourselves to a KFC for breakfast. We headed back to Medan airport to catch our flight to the region of Lombok. We had had a fantastic time in Sumatra, but we couldn't wait to see some blue skies instead of grey haze.

We arrived in Lombok late at night and caught a taxi to our hotel in Senggigi. Lombok is home to the second highest volcano in Indonesia, called Mount Rinjani, which is 3,726m high. It is one of one hundred and twenty nine active volcanoes in Indonesia. The last time it erupted was May 2010. It is popular to trek Mount Rinjani whilst in Lombok, but the trek takes between three and five days, and unfortunately we did not have enough time without sacrificing other places we wanted to visit. We definitely plan to come back to Lombok and climb Mount Rinjani though.

Lombok is surrounded by smaller islands locally known as Gili Islands. From the Gili Islands you can see Mount Rinjani looming over the island of Lombok.

We arranged to catch a bus early in the morning to Bangsal, where regular boats leave all day for three of the Gili Islands; Gili Trawangan, Gili Meno and Gili Air. The Gili Islands offer a laid back backpacker feel and also a high class resort destination. We were asked which island we were going to, and had to decide quickly which one we wanted to visit first. Another guy from our guest house was also getting a boat from Bangsal, and said he was going to Gili Trawangan (better known as Gili T), so we opted to go there too. our new friend was from Japan but had become a teacher in Canada. He told us that he was travelling because he had decided to write travel guides for countries that major companies (such as lonely planet) had neglected. He had already been in Bali and Lombok, and after the Gili Islands he planned to go to Thailand.

We waited beside the shore for about forty minutes, until the boat going to Gili T had been loaded up with all the resources the locals were transporting over to the island from the mainland. This included chickens, food, and crops (which we assumed was to feed their horses and cows).

The boats are long and narrow, and when the sea is rough they are particularly unsafe, with reports of people drowning. However it was luckily quite a calm day. When we climbing onto the boat, we heard someone shouting our name. Amazingly it was two of the girls we had trekked through the jungle with!

We left our hotel at 7am and by the point it was now mid day, so we were pretty desperate to get into our hotel. The past two days had just been spent travelling, but we are actually very lucky that it was possible because it was not long ago that the norm would have been to travel the whole way from Sumatra by bus and ferry.

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