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Published: April 17th 2008
015 - Indonesia - Gili Air
04/07/08 - 04/12/08
We Like Gili Air
Gili Air is a tiny island just north of Lombok that showed us the genuine, mellower side of Indonesia. Although it is only a few kilometers away from it's larger sister island, Gili Air feels like a different place; a place that both Hannah and I learned to love.
As if to highlight the differences in location, the departure point from Lombok is the port town of Bangsal where we waited for 45 minutes as unrelenting touts tried to sell us bracelets, beer, and false stories of what to expect on Gili Air. A group of 4 young English travelers told us a story of how they had been hustled at Bangsal: porters grabbed their bags as their bus pulled up and then charged them $5 per bag once they had caried them only a short distance. Highway robbery!!
Gili Air is different. It's very small, taking about 1.5 hrs to traverse the entire island. The locals genuinely smile and converse with you. They remember your name and ask how your dive went or what you ended up doing the other night. Waiters
will pull up a seat and a guitar next to your table and seranade you with classic American songs in their distinct Indonesian accent. I can't tell you how many times we sang 'Hotel California' to the strumming of local guitars (actually being from California I was a little ashamed to not know the lyrics as well as I ought to)!!
One of the bars hosted a 'dark moon' party on a Wednesday night. This 'once-every-two-months' event was the talk of the town. The party drew visitors from the surrounding islands and had 'world class' Djs spinning from 10 PM until 10 AM the next morning. Unfortunately, neither of us are really in to raves or house music so we got bored and went to sleep by 2 AM. We woke up at 8:30 AM the next morning and could still hear the beating of deep base from the party!
We got two really good dives in at Gili Air (and at nearby Gili Trawangan) and also did some awesome snorkelling. We met two female divers on the island that expressed a desire to dive with manta rays (there was a sighting with a SCUBA group the day
before we dove) and found out there is a cleaning station (a spot where manta rays hang out to be cleaned by other fish) on Nusa Pendida, another island right off of Bali. So, we packed our bags with our two new friends and set off for Bali on a mission to dive with some manta rays!!
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Liana
non-member comment
OMG, the blown out flip flops are totally cracking me up right now!