Goodbye Gili Trawangan!

We have enjoyed our time on Gili Trawangan but now we are hoping over to the next island! Here we come Gili Meno!

Polaroids!

Today we decided to ride bikes around the island. We thought it might take a while, but after an hour of pushing our bikes through the sand we came to two conclusions: 1) we could have walked around the island in only an hour and 2) biking on sand really doesn't work.

The beaches on the western coast of the island are completely deserted and would have been beautiful if it hadn't been for all the garbage that washed ashore. In a 1x1 space on the sand I counted over ten abandoned sandals...it was just weird, like a whole island of lost shoes!

On another note, there are tons of places to watch outdoor movies here, so we have been sitting down on beanbags each night, nuttella and banana crepe in hand, while watching movie after movie.

Snorkeling with Turtles

The Gili's are supposed to have amazing snorkeling, so we thought we would give it a try. We wandered out of our hotel and up to a snorkel shack a few meters up (and yes, they have shacks on the beach solely dedicated to the pursuit of snorkeling). We rented our two masks/fins for $6.00 for the whole day- we're not sure if this was a good deal or not, but we took it anyways.  Snorkeling proved to be harder than I ever thought! There is a wicked current that rips to the north so it made swimming up (the south) kind of like a treadmill, a whole lot of swimming with no progress. So we jumped out, walked up, and jumped back in to coast with the current back on down. While we were flying over reefs we saw 5! turtles, which is awesome because I've seen a grand total of 0 turtles in the wild (Brian's seen a bit more than that). Anyways, these were good sized turtles and we happened to miss them in each photo, so enjoy the photos of the caged baby turtles below (they are saved as eggs and then raised for the first year in little tanks before being released back into the wild)!

Gili-T

We have been hiding out on the island of Gili-T,  the biggest of the three Gili islands. It's tropical paradise here and we are staying at bungalows that serve WINNER schnitzel on the menu, now what could be better than that!? Despite the random outcropping of poorly spelled German cuisine, Gili-T is a tropical paradise. We've spent our days walking the sandy road, eating at open air warungs, and sleeping on the beach or playing in the pristine turquoise water.

 

 

Padangbai to Lombok

We took off from the little Balinesian port town of Padangbai and loaded the ferry to the island of Lombok. To leave Bali was actually kind of a relief. I was done being asked a million questions as a lead-in to a sales pitch. The constant, "where are you going," "what are you doing," "is he your husband" and the inevitable "do you need transport?" or "you want bracelet?" was a huge HUGE annoyance.  So with the Balinesian hawkers gladly left behind, we boarded the ever-so-slow public ferry. Unfortunately, it was my day to be tortured, and they played The Mechanic for our visual entertainment. In Malaysia,  Brian forced me to go and see The Mechanic, and to my good luck, I was again a captive audience, obliged to sit through the beefy wonderlessness of The Mechanic round DOS. 

 Anyways, Lombok sits in the Nusa Tengarra archipelago and we thought this little island/the gilis would hold the key to our tropical hideaway. Well, unfortunately, we were dropped off at Sengiggi, which was nothing more than an expensive ghost town. We only spent the night, for free, and nothing is better than free! (The people running our guest house never checked us in or could be found again after first contact, oh well). Now we are at the beautiful Gilis islands, sipping mojitos and sitting on the beach while writing this...life is hard....