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We finally managed a holiday in Indonesia where neither of us were sick, unless you include Gill being seasick while snorkeling off Gili Air (this particular incident involved Andy mistakenly swimming through the floating carrots and wondering what strange marine life it was).
We took advantage of the election day and Easter holidays to spent 9 days on Lombok, which is east of Bali. The first half of the trip involved pure R&R. We left Jakarta and 6 hours later were heading for swim on Gili Meno, one of three small islands off the north west of Lombok. Population 200, and we had a great villa on the beach. There is not much to do on Gili Meno apart from snorkeling right off the beach, relaxing walks around the island (circumference 3 km) and eating seafood and drinking a cold beer. There are no motorised vehicles on any of the islands and the staple food appears to be red snapper. Perfect.
We took a boat our for some better snorkeling off Gili Air, including seeing quite a lot of turtles and a glimpse of a barracuda. The coral around the Gilis are quite damaged, partly due to bomb fishing (now banned) and mostly though bleaching from a La Nina event that increased sea temperatures. Still, the marine life is good and there are plenty of crazy coloured fish around. We also went to the “party island” of Gili Trangawan for a day and hired bikes, snorkeled, and drank Bali Storm Beer in a nice cafe.
After enough days of relaxation, we left the Gilis for the mainland for an overnight stay before starting our trek of Gunung Rinjani (Rinjani volcano) – see the next post.
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