Gili Trawangan

The "Gili" islands (gili means "island" but anyway…) are three small islands located just off the Northeast coast of Lombok. Gili Trawangan is the largest of the three, but to say the word large would be totally out of place - you could walk around the island in an hour and a half. It was known as the "party island" although it was a pretty mellow place when you wanted it to be. The other two islands are even smaller and quieter - Gili Air and Gili Meno.

We got there in the morning (according to rule #3 - always try to arrive in the morning) via private bemo to Bangsa then a public ferry (1 1/2-hour wait) which took about an hour to reach the island. As soon as we stepped foot on the beach, we felt like our journey had finally begun. After all, this was supposed to be our 'relaxation destination' after our time in Japan. We quickly found a great place called Eky Losmen which, situated about 300 meters from the beach, turned out to be a great deal - clean, nice staff and a great breakfast served at your doorstop veranda. Beth did the bargaining and got the price down to 20,000 and we were quite happy spending all five nights there.

We got to know our neighbours a bit - two British “gals” in their early twenties. They had just graduated from University; where they majored in… get this… “Leisure Studies”. I know, I know, it’s a legitimate major (cough.. cough), teaching people how to work in the travel and tourism industry, but these two were the epitome of leisure-seeking beach bums. We would bump into them later on in our trip.

After dumping our stuff, we went to a dive shop/restaurant (every place there had a restaurant attached!). We chatted up a Swedish girl (Jenny) that was reading at a table next to us and it turned out she was the instructor at Dive Indonesia/Blue Coral Divers and had a course starting at noon. Beth had been thinking of getting her license, as she was sick of waiting on the beach while our friends and I dove, and because we were headed to Koh Samui in Thailand to meet friends for diving.

Despite being a little nervous, she went for it. Over the next four days, she battled her fears (ok, it didn’t hurt that she was enrolled with three Swedish…. Beth’s words…”hunks”) got her license ($270 USD) while I did 4 dives ($30/2 dives). We were both in awe of the visibility and beauty of the water. There were lots of turtles, black tip reef sharks and some luck people even saw dolphins. Depending on the season, they also get whale sharks and manta rays. Diving sites surrounded the islands, so you didn’t have take full day trips - you dove and came back via speed boat.

We were amazed at the four Swedes – it seemed like they could all speak at least half a dozen languages fluently. Beth and I had spent the last three years diligently (ok, semi-diligently) studying Japanese, and we were only up to a good conversational level. Where did these Swedes get the time to get so fluent? Not to self: investigate Swedish education system….

Almost all of the restaurants had videos showing in the afternoon and night, and being a movie buff and coming from the land of $20 movies, I was in seventh heaven. My first night watching a movie on a restaurant TV, I’ll never forget this, was Liar Liar. I’m watching it with a half dozen other people, and there are some funny parts, and we’re laughing away, but something struck me as unusual – I couldn’t put my finger on it. All of a sudden, on-screen, a black shadow of a man stands up and walks off screen! I was no longer a pirated-movie virgin. There’s nothing like watching a movie with a built in laugh track and a few hundred on-screen guest performances. We watched a wack of these pirated movies that wouldn't have arrived in Japan until sometime next century. There were plenty of used bookshops for buying or trading, and the usual assortment of sarong and other clothing shops.

The food was great - one night we had a BBQ organized by the dive shop featuring fresh mackerel, rice, noodles, and sweet and sour vegetable for 7,000 rupiah. We found lunch usually cost about 9,000 and dinner about 15,000 for the two of us.

The things that I remember clearly about Gili Trawangan other than the beauty and serenity of the island was…. Wait for it… the cats! They're everywhere! Whereas on Bali, where things were overrun with dogs, Trawangan had literally thousands of cats (half of them without tails due to inbreeding). Scandinavians! They too were everywhere - Norwegians, Swedes as well as their neighbours the Dutch. We were in total awe as everyone communicated in almost perfect English and we felt almost ashamed to be from semi-unilingual North America. Lastly, I have strong memories of the greeting/sales pitch 'hello, hello, where are you going' from the horse and buggy drivers (there were no motorized vehicles on the island but you could hire bicycles) and the Parama shuttle operators.

After five nights, our beach paradise vacation was over. On the morning of July 5^th, we worked our way back from Lombok to Bali.