Starting where we left off, we took a horse and carriage back to the hostel, Old Villages, for 100,000 Rupiah (ca 6 eur). It was indeed an old village, if you consider its design with houses with straw roofs. It had fresh rooms with air conditioning, along with nice breakfast and very nice personnel, as we would later find out. The bedrooms were big, with a balcony providing a nice place to view the surrounding nature, as well as eating food in the mornings. The toilet was in a room detached from the bedroom, and we had to walk to the side of the house in order to access it. It was not the most fresh bathroom I have been in, but aside from the cockroach I had to kill in it, it worked!
Anyways, moving on, we moved on. We quickly got out of the hostel in order to go to the northern beach of Gilli Air. On the way there, we got a prelude of how many drugs that are circulating on the islands. Many bars and restaurants offered mushrooms and ‘magic drinks’ (from what I understood of it, alcohol drinks with mushrooms in them). It was a little bit sad to see how some of the locals had serious addiction problems with the mushrooms and alcohol. Even more so when we found out that the mushrooms were grown out of cow poop. Yep, locals ate magic cow poop food in order to get happier.
Anyways, ignoring this, we soon got to the beach and strolled around on the main road, which was basically a sand road circling around the island’s coastline. Over here, there were small outdoor markets selling accessories, along with restaurants and bars selling food for ca 3 EUR per meal and beers (50 cl bintang) and drinks for around the same price. We strolled around here for a bit, and got excited for a snorkelling trip for the next day - a snorkelling trip taking us around the three Gilli Islands and stopping for lunch on Gilli Meno.
We decided to buy it later, and kept on walking until we found a really nice beach bar with good deals for drinks. We got three drinks for 100,000 Rupiah (ca 6 EUR), and enjoyed a really nice beach view.
Over here, we also met Anita the norwegian girl. She is crazy.
She first asked us if she could join us in our drinks, because she was tired of sitting alone and reading. Being the soical creature I am, I really liked this move, and was happy to have her join us. She also seemed to have travelled quite alot, as she talked about some of her adventures in Africa, helping citizens in those countries for some kind of voluntary work she was doing. She had just graduated from a six year long university education, and she was in her late thirties. Now she celebrated by taking a three week trip through Bali, the Gillis, Lombok and eventually the Komodo islands. Her home address was still at her parents’ house, because she had been travelling so much in the past years. Apparently I did not see that there was something strange about this person; instead I thought it was just a very interesting person with, hopefully, many interesting and funny stories to tell. I guess it was the strong drink I got, but we ended up talking for 1-2 hours about her life. Also, we decided to grab dinner with her later. Before that, though, we decided to take a look at the sunset, which apparently makes it possible to see the Mt. Agung volcano on Bali.
We went back to the hostel after an hour of getting lost on the island and changed clothes after an entire days worth of travels, and then hired bikes to go back to the beach. We were quite late for the meetup with the norwegian lady. On the way, Markus pointed out that she was quite weird, which got into my head when we met up with her again.
She was a little bit pissed at us for being 40 minutes late, but we eventually sat down in a restaurant to get some grilled fish - shared tuna for me and Markus, since the loss of my debit card made our budget quite small. In the restaurant, I was sober and now started to notice all the oddities of this norwegian old lady. She said that she hated people who were really old and kept travelling and got desperate for attention to tell all their stories - although she was exactly that. Her mouth ran like a marathon runner on steroids, and Markus’ eyes seemed to pop out of his head, as the stories kept on flooding. He does not like too talkative people.
All of a sudden, we learnt a whole lot more about her. She had been to South America as a 30th birthday present to herself, where she had gotten sexually harassed everywhere she went. She was bisexual and used that as a way to get away from the men over there. At one point she randomly wondered what human meat tastes like. She kept on mentioning friends she had on the island, but it seemed as though these ‘friends’ were the drug dealers and bartenders that handed out mushrooms, weed and alcohol - which she, by the way, seemed to do every night there. Apparently, orangutans rape women in Indonesia, as one of her favourite and ‘very famous and very legit’ biological scientists had written reports about it. She herself had graduated in biological sciences, but what she read when we met her were some sort of economical research articles, as this was a ‘fun read’. She was also a vegetarian that eats fish and meat (huh? How does this even..? What?). I got quieter and quieter, and Markus kept on saying “she talks… ALOT”. I guess she could sense our uncomfort as well, as she got more and more eager to leave and find excuses to not be around us. We just had to go through 1-2 hours of weirdness to get to this point.
After she had left us, we walked to a bar where a waiter started talking to us and wanting us to try mushrooms. “Never try, never know” was a steadily recurring phrase we heard throughout the rest of travels. He was, sadly, very addicted to the mushrooms, and mentioned that the mushrooms also make him drink alot of alcohol. What is even more sad is that he goes up around 6 am every morning and starts working the day after taking all of these drugs. This was apparently a normal schedule on the island. Get up early, work all day, take drugs during the night, rinse, repeat - every day.
Having kindly rejected his offers, we made our way back to the hostel and got lost a second time. On the way back, we bought our tickets to the snorkelling trip next day. Finally finding the hostel, we got free ice tea from the staff. It was a weird night, but it was a nice sleep, as the hotel staff had made the day end in a good way!
Next day, we went up early, caught some really nice breakfast, and then went on the snorkelling trip with 20 other people.
We met some other (normal) norwegians who were studying in Sydney. They were really nice people, and even had a chinese version of a GoPro with them. Hopefully, I will get access to some of their underwater videos soon! During the snorkelling trip, I was able to see two turtles and even touch one of them. However, that was not nearly as many as Markus saw; he saw 11 turtles throughout the entire day. I was a bit jealous of him for this.
Anyways, the schedule was constructed as following: we first stopped by two different spots for snorkelling for about half an hour at each spot. Then we went to Gilli Meno to eat some lunch for 80 minutes. Me and Markus ignored the guides’ recommended restaurant and instead went a little bit further to eat at a very local restaurant. It was very cheap, and although it was made with fast noodles, the chef/waitress/restaurant owner made our Mie Goreng really good. It was quite fun to see her having to go over to a friend’s house in order to get some eggs for our dishes as well. The pineapple juice I got was also delicious.
After the lunch, we made one more stop for snorkelling outside Gilli Air, where I managed to touch a turtle. Then we got back to land and a Norwegian guy, Sondre, from the group we met, joined us for a swim on the southern beach.
Moving forward, we made our way back to the hostel and bought some rice wine for 70,000 Rupiah (ca 4 EUR) from a shady guy, along with a peeled and sweetened pineapple from an old lady. I was very much skeptic of the rice wine, but Markus really wanted it, so we bought it. We waited for 10 minutes for the shady guy to go and get it from a friend, and when he got back, we could see some light brown liquid in a 1,5 liter used water bottle. I was even more convinced not to drink much of it, as I had heard about people getting methanol poisoning from home brewed alcohol in this region before. The shady guy was quite happy with us having bought it, though. In fact, he was so happy, he tried to sell us weed one minute later.
Having kindly rejected his offer, we got back to the hostel, rested, and then headed for the sunset. It was a really nice sunset; especially after we had missed all sunsets in Hong Kong. It got a bit romantic… Just like these islands.
I even think god had a presence.
Yeah, we had sensed it a little bit up to this point. These islands were honeymoon islands. And here me and Markus were casually doing our recess week; watching sunsets, sharing food, doing snorkelling trips, paying for each other’s expenses, finishing each other’s sentences, worrying about the kids back at home. Wrapping it up, I guess these islands can be recommended for future honeymoons - they even have lots of spas! One of the spas I thought looked really cool was called Slow Spa in the middle of the island.
Later, we went to eat dinner, but it seemed as though most restaurants had closed. we decided to sit down at one of the few lit upp restaurants, and we started seeing people wearing headband gears with flashlights on them. Many places started lighting candles and fires, and we thought it looked really nice. The place shown below is a restaurant I would have, in hindsight, wanted to eat at, but did not get a chance to…
It was only until we got back to the hostel that we found out that this was a power outage, and that power outages here are really common. In the last month they had had one in every 1-2 days on average, and it was because Lombok could not provide enough electricity to the island. This one was particularly long, so we decided to stay in the hostel until it was done. Later on, the norwegians invited us to join them for a beach bar, but as some of us did not want to party along with the fact that we were under a very limited budget, we decided to go to bed instead.
Next day, it was time for Gilli Trawangan!