Australian travels...: Gili Islands continued

Gili Trawangan and Meno

After my birthday day in Gili Air, we woke up the next morning and caught the island hoping boat to Gili Meno. Gili Meno is the smallest of the three islands and the quietest with only a population fo 300 people. There are very few hotels/bungalows and the whole south side is pretty much vacated, even with abandones hotels/bungalows! We arrived and started on our tour around the island, again, making stops along the way to chill, grab a drink, or go for a swim. The days where pretty warm so it was always nice to go for a refreshing swim in the ocean. We had to catch the shuttle bus back at around 4:00, and arrived back at Gili Air about 20 minutes later. We headed back to our bungalow for a shower and headed back to the fabulous restaurante we found the day before......and once again, no electricty for cake! Bummer! The cool thing about the islands was the set up they had for meals. You sat on a raised bamboo platform, sitting on pillows with a low table. Usually set up for two and facing the ocean. Such an amazing feeling eating dinner, sea-side, listening to the water crash against the beach, and gazing at the millions upon millions of stars. You also had the option to watch a movie while you ate dinner. This night, the TV was free, after browsing through the many pirated DVD's, we settled on Slumdog Millionaire. Both of us had seen the movie but enjoyed it so much, we opted to watch it again. We started the movie, ordered our meal, drank some beer (well, I did), ate out meal and with about 30 minutes left of the film, it started to freeze. It started off with about a 5-10 second freeze but it kept getting worse and worse. Finally, we got sick of waiting and restarting the DVD, we called it quits, and headed back to the bungalow. Even though we pretty much did nothing during the day, its always surprising how exhausted you are after a day in the sun! After reading my book for a bit, I hit the sac and crashed listening to the ocean only 20m away.

The next day we where up early again catching the boat again, this time to Gili Trawangan. Gili Trawangan is the more up-beat touristy island, and man was it ever. As soon as you pull up on the beach, you can see how many more people there are, restaurants, dive shops, and even a couple paved roads!! There is also this small 'hill' that you can climb and we had decided on the way over that we would climb it. We headed toward the hill right away as we didn't want to do it in the heat of the day, and after walking and walking, we realized that we could not find the start of the path!! After about an hour, we decided to give up, in fact, we wheren't even going to walk around the whole island as planned, instead, we would find a nice spot on the beach, and chill! So that's what we did, chilled, tanned, swam, read and listened to music. Man life is hard! After eating a small lunch, it was time to head to the waiting area to catch the boat back to Gili Air. Trawangan was the furthest from Air, so we had to be there by 3:30, kind of cutting our day short (and arriving later compared to Gili Meno as we stopped there first), and Warwick had to be there like 30 minutes before the boat left - a little extreme, but I didn't mind. I just set up on the beach and read my book waiting! Again, we arrived at Gili Air, headed to our bungalow and got ready for the evening. It was like we had a routine down! Except this time, we headed to the west side of the island first to watch the sunset. We had yet to see the sunset and I wanted to take pictures of it. We arrived pretty early, but that's ok, it was an excuse to get a beer and watch the world go by. The sun set, quickly, as usual, and I snapped away with my camera, and once I was satisfied, we headed back to our favorite resaurant - Munchies! and guess what?? They had cake!!!! So after eating our fantastic meal, we ordered our a piece of chocolate cake - yumm!! Wasn't the best, but hey, it was chocolate, and it was cake, and I was on a tropical island!! We went to bed early, again, but this time I was OK with it as we had an early morning the next day as we headed back to Kuta. PLUS, I hadn't gotten a picture of the sunrise so decided that i had to get up early anyways, what's an extra 30 minutes to watch the sunrise. And was it a beautiful one!! I could watch the sunrise every morning if I could get my butt out of bed that early, each day! We had to be at the jetty for 7am, and we got a Cidomo at 6:30. I was a little worried i was going to react like the first time, however we seemed to arrive quicker, probably helped that it was light out, and I wasn't wheezy at all or even have swollen eyes. There was only a few of us on the boat and it just took us to Lombok. You see, it was a little more complicated to get back to bali which we where unaware of until we arrived on Gili Air. Once we arrived on the island of Lombok, we had about a 300m walk, which we paid pennies to take a Cidomo as neither of us wanted to walk it. Then from there we caught a bus that took us to Sengigi where we then caught the boat back to bali. We did get breakfast once we arrived on the boat, as well as a small lunch - most of which I couldn't eat, but that was ok. Then we had an hour and a half bus ride into Kuta, and if you can believe it, as we where driving in, I saw my friends Gethin and Brid walking down the street. I stuck my head out and said hi, in disbelief that i managed to see them in the crazy busy city of Kuta.