Let me begin by first stating that I have had a hard time deciding how to start this post: nothing particularly funny happened, nothing exploded, no one died...well, I almost did. Where to start under such "boring" circumstances? How does one write about a vacation that was nearly sublimely perfect? I am at a lose for words when things aren't chaotic. I will turn on the 80s music and give it a shot though.
In spite of having to leave Ubud the next morning - at 6am and
travel for 10 hours - Mindy and I decided to go out and do a little partying that night. We have continuously shown ill judgement when partying. Not so much in quantity, but in timing. Of the 16 days we spent in Indonesia we partied hard one night. One night. Every other night, we were in bed no later than 11:00pm. It just so happened we were traveling the next morning. That night we started at the local reggae bar where we listened to a band whose lead singer must have been trying to mimic Rod Stewart's raspy voice. From there things got a little hazy. We watched as a group of older Russian women (one in painfully short shorts) danced and contorted themselves on the dance floor. We met a Danish actor named Victor and a Canadian importer named Ron. Ron's second home seemed to be Ubud as he knew everyone and everything about it. He was a wealthy businessman who had stories of smuggling cocaine up his bum in the 70s and running out of indigenous villages at midnight in South America. We spent the
remainder of the night at an ex-pat bar and stumbled home around 3:30 after a night of drinking the local "whiskey" called Arak and the local beer. After 2 hours of sleep my alarm went off. Not cool.
That day we caught a bus, took a rolling 4 hour flat bottomed
ferry ride across the Indian Ocean to Lombok, hopped a bus to Bangasal and then took a local boat -into an oncoming storm- to ourfinal location: Gili Trawangan. The Gili Islands are a group of three islands of paradise directly off the coast of Lombok. You can walk around each in around 3 hours. We went to the Gili's with the intent of diving, but they turned out to be so much more. We spent our days either diving with the Blue Marlin Dive Co., surfing, sunning on the beach with books, eating incredible food, or playing Scrabble (that is my "Scrabble Assasin" face)-while eating incredible food. To give you an idea: I paid around 5 dollars for a steak of Swordfish that would have choked a Grizzly AND I got an open salad bar.
I even managed to get my butt off the beach and help the locals unload a boat full of cement
bags. It wasn't as fun as I thought, so I quit after four trips and
went for a swim. As you may expect, our days were full of water sports. I attempted to retry my hand as surfing and quickly realized why I quit trying 7 years ago: I simply don't have the patience. On my paddle out I was a fuming mess. I couldn't paddle, I kept nearly falling off and my board was too damn small. I was complaining and was basically a big pansy. After attempting to ride two waves and getting slammed, I quit. I will never be Mindy's "cool surfer boyfriend". Not only did we "surf (technically, I didn't), we SCUBA dove. In 8 days I dove 10 times (and received an Advanced Diving Certification) and Mindy got in 7 dives (she already had her Advanced Cert....always so much cooler than me). While diving we saw everything from turtles, sea horses, frog fish, squid, cuttle fish, octopus, and a handful of white tip sharks (none of those are my pictures). The list of sea creatures we saw would be too long to list here.
Having only seen one other shark in my life, they were the most incredible. We even touched the tail of a 1 meter long juvenile. The biggest we saw was about 1.5 to 2 meters in length - absolutely beautiful at a close distance.
Our nights were spent hanging at the local Irish pub, "Tir na Nog", playing darts. Even on a remote island in Indonesia we were able to find our favorite sport, darts. If we weren't at the Irish bar we were watching movies, smoking sheesha, partying with our dive company, or enjoying some of the delicious restaurants the island had to offer. Yes, I said "watching movies." This is not as lame as you may think actually. If you buy around 5 dollars of food you can rent a small thatched hut, called a beruga, that is raised off the sand and has pillows and a fan. So there we would sit, a cold bowl of ice cream in our hands, listening to the waves roll onto the beach accompanied by the sound of screams and gunshots from our movie. What a dichotomy. On one random afternoon Mindy attended a beach party that apparently was a video shoot for one of Indonesia's biggest reggae bands. Later we headed back to the beach for the after party.
The Gili's weren't all fun and games actually (well, they were but this was a good transition sentence). The heat in Indonesia is quite intense as it is on the equator and therefore in much more direct sunlight. As a result, Mindy got some heat exhaustion that I, with my medical expertise, first diagnosed as just a bad sunburn. Oh, and I got Typhoid Fever. Did I forgot to mention that? Yeah, I actually contracted a serious bacterial infection. It was about the worst experience I have had. One moment I feel I am just tired and weak, the next I am feeling pretty hot with a decent headache (Mindy has kindly placed two cold water bottles in my arm pits), and the next I can barely walk upright, my headache is screaming, delirium, and my temperature is around 103 degrees.
Mindy had to walk me to the island's only form of transportation so that I could go to the local clinic, which we didn't even know existed until Mindy went to search out a thermometer out of fear I had malaria. Luckily, I didn't. At the clinic they pumped me full of 2.5 bags of saline and glucose, antibiotics, strong pain relievers, pills for this and pills for that, and then the doctor and Mindy watched TV while I rolled around in agony. If it wasn't for the pain it probably would have been an awesome night! I sent Mindy home around 1am and then I proceeded to sweat and moan until about 8am. If you haven't had Typhoid don't try it. Not cool stuff.
The next morning, instead of dealing with the 10 hour trek back to Ubud for our final two days we decided to ditch our pre-purchased return boat ticket and pay the little extra for the speed boat, which cuts that travel time by 8 hours. It was well worth it even if Mindy got a little nauseous.
Traveling in Indonesia was the most amazing experience. I wish my post here could do it justice, but I am currently experiencing severe writer's block. Regardless, I hope you could glean some idea of the time we had on Gili Trawangan. Bali, Ubud, Lombok, and the Gili's are extremely unique. The culture is open. The people and weather warm. They are less traveled. I must say, if you ever have the opportunity to go, part of me hopes you do and part of me hopes you stay away. Save it for me the next time I go.
