At the moment we're happily nestled on a mooring in a calm bay called Teluk Kombal on the North West side of Lombok island-East of Bali. We spent a few days moored off the outer of three small Gili islands called Gili Trawangan where we Tossed about on a mooring ball by rolling seas and heavy currents! There was a good reason we put up with this however, our Norwegian friends Ingvil and Gunnar off of s/v Helen Kate met on this very island seven years ago. It's been a huge mile stone in their circumnavigation to have been able to return here on their own sail boat and revisit where they first set eyes on each other and ultimately fell in Love!! I've never seen either of them so excited and so putting up with a little rolling was the least we could do. The island is pretty small and took us roughly an hour and a half to walk around but there is a lot crammed in to a small space. When Ingvil and Gunnar were first here it was known as the party island but they weren't prepared for how much more touristy it's become. The main street has many Restaurants, cafes and hostels all filled with white backpacker faces and offering western style food, swimming pools and Magic Mushrooms! There is still a lot of charm here and it doesn't yet seem ruined by tourism, there are no cars or trucks just horse drawn buggies and most of the roads are made of sand. The beaches are covered in small fishing boats and as soon as you walk off the main street you step into what could be any Indonesian village.
It was a little too rough during the day for us to spend any time on the boat so we would head ashore in the morning and return late at night. Anywhere else this may cause a problem but here we were more than happy to laze around on one of the fabulous beach huts propped up on pillows listening to music and ordering whenever we got hungry or thirsty...tough life! They even had little cabanas with TV's in where we could pick out a copied DVD and watch it as we ate...this is what we do in paradise?! We were just as happy to pick out a nice cafe and sit and people watch for the afternoon, we haven't seen this many tourists for a while and they're just so elaborately funny! The island has great charm and is really chilled out, it was a fantastic re-introduction into a more touristy area before we hit Bali and I'd definitely recommend it as a stop...just maybe at a less windy time! Most other cruisers stopped at the closest island to the main land 'Gilli Air' as it offers a lot more mooring balls in a calmer spot. From what we heard it was also very beautiful with more larger resorts and a quieter atmosphere.
Now we are enjoying a nice calm anchorage on Lombok for a couple of days, there's not much right here but yesterday we hired a 'Bemo' (mini van) to explore some of the island where we saw loads of friendly monkeys up in the Jungle and visited some weaving and pottery villages. The Landscape here is a lot more tropical and humid...today we even got our first rain fall for over four months. We ran around with buckets and a scrubbing brush trying to clean the boat down with it's first fresh water shower in a long time!
----------
radio email processed by SailMail
for information see: http://www.sailmail.com
Posts
No comments:
Post a Comment