Day 8 - a Lazy day on Gili Air

Most people that know me will think of me as fairly adventurous with all my mud races, marathon running and travelling, but one thing that I struggle with a fair amount is boats - I'm not scared of them, in fact my parents used to own a barge for many years and I even remember falling in a few times as a child.  However in recent years I seem to suffer from terrible seasickness - on ferries to Norway and Sweden I was violently sick after just a coupl of hours, on a catamaran in Mallorca I brought up my entire breakfast (and let me tell you there are far better things to see for a second time than chorizo and goats cheese!) and even on a small crossing I feel a bit uneasy.  I guess now I'm more worried about being sick which makes it worse.

So Anna wanted to go snorkeling and see some sea turtles, I'd loved to have given it a go, but I was nervous and also feeling pretty uncomfortable after about 17 mossie bites, so she was going to join an organised tour of the 3 islands at 9.30am coming back at 3pm and I was going to chill out and read etc. 

Unfortunately the boat went without her!  We had a wander around the island looking for alternatives, but the best option seemed to be one of the guys back at Segar Villages taking her on the private boat for a couple off hours for the equivalent of about £25.  Once we'd decided that we did a bit more chilling out back at the same place as we'd done the previous day, ate some lunch and then Anna went off at about 2 pm and so I took advantage of the opportunity to have a decent shower and then let my hair dry before I got too hot and had to put it up again!

Anna loved her trip and saw 7 sea turtles as well as even better fish than we had seen on the beach.  She got showered and changed and we went off for a drink - happy hour margarita - at Paridiso bar - very loud pumping music which seemed incongruous with the calm feel across the island in general.  

We moved on and went back to Chill out Bungalows, hopped onto a beach hut bench and had another lovely meal.  We went for another pizza which we shared and then I had the Lombok Salad again with some cheesy chips.

I went to bed feeling quite relaxed, although still itchy from the mossie bites!

(Some interesting messages below on restaurants that I saw on Gili)

Day 7 - Waking up on a Desert Island

On our first morning on Gili Air I work up to the sound of the waves crashing outside (which we could hear as long as we'd turned off the Air Con!)

We wandered over to the reception area which was the only place you could consistently get WIFI and ordered our choice - Anna had a chocolate pancake and I had an omelette with garlic, onion, tomato and cheese and I had an iced coffee.

After breakfast we packed up our beach stuff including snorkels and walked all of about 100m down to Gili Air Santay Bungalows & Restaurant where we set up in a beach hut and grabbed a couple of drinks.  I had lots of blogging to catch up on and my only goal of the day was to catch up, do some painting and read some of my book.

Anna jumped straight into the sea and came back marveling at all the different fish that she had seen including Angel fish.  I was inspired to chuck on the mask that I had bought from the supermarket back in Ubud and give it a go.  Unfortunately for me my initial walk into he sea which is extremely shallow for the first 50m - up to knee height - was a bit painful as there was lots of coral which jabbed into my feet.  I managed to get out to a reasonable depth to swim, put my mask on, adjusted it, but it seemed to make no difference what I did - I would put my head in the water - try really hard to breathe just through my mouth which I struggle with at the best of times and still I'd get water in my mask.  I saw about 5 fish which was nice, but got frustrated and walked back to the shore wincing as I stepped onto the coral with my bare feet.

We had a break from all the relaxing for lunch and I ordered Gado Gado and a Yellow fish and coconut curry - both were beautiful, but huge portions so I didn't end up eating much of it.

I continued to catch up with my blog until Anna kindly leant me her snorkel and mask to have a try myself.  She was also kind enough to let me squash my size 8 hooves into her teeny size 4 sandals so that I could get into the water without having to feel the scratchy dead coral underfoot.  Not having the mask fill up with water every 10 seconds made such a difference.  I was enthralled I saw fish that I’ve only ever seen in fish tanks at aquariums or on the TV!  There were bright, vivid electric blue tiny fish darting about in small schools only about 2 or 3cm long.  There were multi coloured and iridescent parrot fish who are about 20 cm long and just don’t realise how pretty they are.   There were loads of black and yellow angel fish about the size of my hand picking away at all the coral and nibbling the bottom of the seabed.  There were hundreds of tiny striped fish a green tinge darting around near the surface.  Lots of larger probably white snapper type fish along the bottom of the seabed.  As I swam around I kept marveling what I was seeing, wishing I had an underwater camera to record it all and trying really hard to commit everything that I could see to memory.

I've added some pictures of the types of fish that I saw - I didn't take them sadly, but they are the fish that I was looking at!

After my underwater adventure I relaxed in my beach hut for a bit longer while Anna took turns to alternate between lying in the sun on the beach and taking time out in the beach hut. I'd brought a book, brushes and watercolour paint set from home that I'd bought at Tate Modern in London just after I'd run London Marathon and painted a picture of the view I had from my beach hut.  I know I'm not very good, but there is something really relaxing and therapeutic about just painting.

We headed back from the beach and I decided that I wanted to try out some yoga at H2o Yoga which was about 5 minutes walk from our hotel - I showered and put on some leggings and a dress and sprayed the rest of me with mossie repellent - unfortunately I hadn't mitigated for the fact that mossies can bite through material and after a lovely 1 and a half hour yoga session which was challenging, but also relaxing.  The teacher was American and it was quite a busy class, but with not too many people that she wasn't able to help those with less experience and make adjustments.  It felt friendly, but perhaps I preferred Yoga Barn for feeling more welcome - although it was clear that some of the people there were regular attendees,  The session cost 100000 rupiah which is the equivalent for about £5 and so pretty good value for money - I just wish I didn't get so bitten during the class.

I headed back to the hotel and we got changed and went out for dinner - we walked up and down for a bit looking at a few different restaurants and eventually decided on Chill Out Bungalows.  Lots of the restaurants on Gili Air have the fish caught that day on display including red snapper, white snapper and perhaps most oddly - parrot fish - we weren't sure if we could bring ourselves to eat the gorgeous fish that we'd been marveling at only hours beforehand in the sea!

Our meal was lovely and the restaurant was really quite busy which is often a good sign.  We shared a pizza for a starter (after lots of curry I had started to crave a bit of western food - terrible I know!) and then I had a Lombok Salad which was spicy, but not head blowing off levels of spice and I had some potato wedges which were huge!  Full and happy we went to bed as things shut down on Gili Air in general pretty early - i.e. by 10pm most of the restaurants were in the process of closing down.

Bali Day 6 and Lombok and Gili

Made's friend came and picked us up at 6am to get us to Denpaser airport for around 7am - we were extremely early for our 9.10am flight and so picked up breakfast...we were bad... we went for Burger King and befriended a rather interesting looking chap who was in a brown patterned shirt from Lombok and was buying a special BK soup.  He then turned up at every point we were at in the airport - including our flight!  

Domestic travel in Indonesia is interesting - we got scanned twice as you do in the UK before we got on the plane, but none of the liquids in transparent plastic bags debarcle and I took through 2 x 1.5 litre bottles of water without them batting an eyelid.  You have to have your wits about you as people will push into the queue in front of you and our boarding passes said gate 18, but then the screen said gate 17 and then the annoucement was gate 18 - with only a handful of passengers to get on the plane it was very much a case of "blink and you'll miss it!".  I had a 2 minute panic where I thought I'd lost my phone, I hadn't, but in running around for a minute I managed to completely fall flat on my side on a tiled surface - ouch - the bruise is yet to materialise though!  We got on the plane which was 2 seats either side of the aisle and was small, but felt perfectly safe.  Wings Air was really cheap to fly with and there were some questions over the safety record, but it all felt fine.  

As soon as we took off, it was time to land with only a 30 minute flight between Denpaser and Lombok airport.  There was a brief moment of confusion where it seemed like we collected our luggage direct from the plane, but soon enough we realised ours was going to come out on the carosel as usual. 

We grabbed our bags and walked through into the throng of taxi companies shouting and vying to get your attention. After a few minutes we managed to negotiate a 2 hour transfer to Bangsal harbour from the airport which is in Matram for 247.5K rupiah - about £12.50 and had a very interesting taxi journey through mountainous rainforest with hundreds of monkeys lining the sides of the road.  

The taxi went to pull through to Bangsal harbour, but was stopped and we could either pay 10000 rupiah (50p) or walk about 400 yards the rest of the way to the harbour which we did although it was all very confusing.  I'd read tips on how to buy boat tickets to Gili Air as there were a few horror stories on the web about how you can get conned into spending lots of money on a ticket for a "fast boat" only to end up on the public boat which costs 10000 rupiah.  I followed the directions from someone on Trip Advisor and took a right at the harbour past the building with orange pillars and a blue roof and we bought tickets to Gili Air from the office there - we asked about the public boat, but it only goes when there are 30 people (apparently) and we would have been passengers 1 and 2 and there wasn't much to do in the port - even lunch wasn't an option with a small handful of shops selling drinks, crisps and cigarettes.  We instead spent 75,000 rupiah each on a fast boat ticket for the 1pm boat (at this point it was about 12pm) and we bought drinks and then waited around for the boat.  As we were waiting we met up with a couple of aussies (well they'd been in Oz for 35 years originally from Brighton and Grimsby/Cleethorpes) who had been apparently waiting for the same boat since before 11am - they'd changed their tickets and managed to get on the same boat as us which left at 1.08pm after they'd been told that their boat was broken.  

After a fairly straightforward crossing (I get terribly seasick on boats!) we arrived to Gili Air after about 15 minutes and I thought for a moment it would be a case of jumping into the shallow waters on the shore to disembark, although after walking along the side of the boat we managed to get onto dry land.  

Gili Air is tiny - you can walk leisurely around the whole circumfrance of the island within 1.5 hours and we were probably only about 1km from our accomodation at Segar Village, but we negotiated a 70,000 rupiah ride to our hotel on a horse and cart!  The horses are so cute and have loads of bells so it almost sounds Christmassy against a paradise beach backdrop.  There are no motorbikes and no cards on Gili Air and with a population of 1800 you really do feel that you are in the middle of nowhere, although with so many different bars and restaurants you don't feel at all like you have left civilisation!

Our room is lovely - stone and coral floors and walls and our bathroom is private, but outside - I had a brief shower looking up through the trees before we headed out to grab some lunch at one of the many beachside cafes.  Our lunch whilst coming from a very basic place was gorgeous and we sat in a lovely beach hut relaxing and watching the beautiful sea.  I had calamari and chips with pickled vegatables (which also included pineapple!).

We continued our walk around the island and got to another point for a stop off and it was happy hour cocktails and so we had Long Island Beach Cocktails - buy one and get one free and lounged around on beanbags and drifted off into a snooze for about an hour! Slowly the Dire Straits album that was on repeat got louder and louder and we woke up and decided that it was time to move on and walk a bit further and so we carried on around the island perimeter and were soon at the port where we'd first arrived.

We kept going back to Seger Villages so that Anna could have a shower and we then went out for dinner at Turtle Beach - we had fish soup and then I had shrimps and avocado and some chips.  It was gorgeous food and we felt very relaxed and so we had a nice early night and slept in our princess style bed with mosquito nets!

Bali day 5 including Yoga

On Tuesday morning I had received some really upsetting news from home so it was to be a day of contemplation and not a hectic day of sightseeing.

After breakfast we went on a bit of an ill fated mission to the supermarket.  Rachel had given us some clear directions - go to the statue and turn left, but we went left for a long long time as we totally missed it - I think our Western views of what a supermarket might look like had probably not helped us as it was not a hugely overly labelled place.  We turned back eventually after about half a mile and found it and stocked up on presents for back home in the form of vanilla pods and spice sets.

We then wandered back through the rice fields over to Rachel's house to see her and the kids for a bit and so Anna could investigate options of buying a huge wooden table and benches and exporting it back to the UK!  Maya was being amusing spent the time tidying up and Kiran did a very cute waking up face for about 10 minutes!

We had lunch at a lovely restaurant with beautiful views over the rice fields where we got to see guys flying kites in the rice fields and worked out that the whirring noise that Anna had thought was frogs was in actual fact the kites!  I had an interesting drink of "green juice" which was pineapple with greens - Maya was keen to try it, but her scrunched up face said it all - it was very full of chlorophyll!  Kiran and Maya played nicely on the slide and the swing and then demolished Rachel's lunch between them!  I had a lovely grilled chicken dish and fish soup - I've very much got into soups since being over here.

We walked back to Rachel's house and Anna went for a wander with a plan of visiting the gym.  I was entertained by both Kiran and Maya playing with a big bucket of water and bubbles!  In Bali playing with water is considered a no-no as it's thought to give diseases, but Maya and Kiran seemed to love it and it's easier for them now they don't live in the family compound with disapproving looks from the in-laws!

I was then off to a yoga class - restorative yoga - at Yoga Barn.  Again Rachel gave me some great directions, but I did the thing where you doubt yourself, double back and then realise you were in actual fact right all along!  By the time I got to the 6pm class it was 6.02pm and I needed to change quickly and was almost in tears - an overreaction I know, but I think it was the result of a lot of things going around in my mind catching up on me.  I got in there as they were starting the class so it was fine and just what I needed to calm down my racing heart and busy mind.  

Yoga Barn have loads of amazing props to use - belts, blocks, blankets, mats and bolsters.  The first part of the class was lying on bolsters and breathing - I could manage that and in fact pretty much all of it was lying down and stretching and breathing.  At the end of the 1.5 hours my heart rate had slowed, my breathing was even and I felt a lot more at peace with myself.  

I walked up Monkey Forest Road back to the hotel and met up with Anna who had swapped the gym idea for a trip to the ice cream parlour!

We went to a more expensive restaurant for dinner and had yummy guacamole for a starter and then I had a monstrous Balinese specialty for my main course and even a dessert of chocolate mousse - gorgeous!  We had an early night as the next day was to be our exciting adventure to Gili Air!

Day 4 - Bali Adventures Day Tripping!

Rachel's husband like many Balinese men seem to be has many different talents and different jobs including a bar job at Hibiscus (where Rachel met him when he was doing magic tricks - another talent!), raising/herding ducks, wood carving, export and driver/tour guide!  We booked Made to take us on a day of exploring.

Made picked us up from our hotel at 9am (well 20 past by the time we stopped messing around) and we headed off first of all to have a look at some silver smithing.  There wasn't a huge amount of demonstration to be seen, but we got to have a look at some of the raw materials and then we looked around a huge shop of some beautiful pieces.  For the equivalent of £8 I bought some lovely silver and amythyst stud earrings.  

Next stop was a beautiful waterfall - It was a few steep steps down to the waterfall and then a scramble over some rocks and then edging around a watery ledge to get right up in front.  The roar of the sound of the water was at the same time intense and crashing, but also extremely calming.  I clambed across to get a closer look whilst Anna looked at butterflies - there are so many gorgeous butterflies in Bali, just hard to get a decent shot as they have a habit of moving around!  I asked a nice couple by the waterfall to take my photo, but in actual fact my "selfie" was probably a bit better!

We clambered up the steps again - hot work! - and then it was onto our next stop - coffee and tea tasting.  A lovely chap took us through a garden of all sorts of interesting plants - I'd never seen cloves growing before and they look as you would expect, but also quite different, also he showed us chilies, cocoa, coffee, evil lemon, ginger, a strange looking different type of rhubarb and ginseng.  

We got to meet a Civet - the mongoose type creature that is used in Bali to create the famous Civet or Luwak Coffee.  Civet Coffee apparently is produced only in Bali and only 300kg per year is manufacturer so it's considered a real delicacy!  In fact whilst all the other coffee and tea we tasted were free - our Civet coffee was 50,000 rupiah (£2.50) for a cup.  Civet coffee is produced by getting the Civet to eat coffee beans, these are then fermented in the stomach and quite frankly excreted before being collected for roasting.  The shell of the bean is removed and the bean is roasted and ground as you would with a usual coffee bean.  We waited with anticipation to compare and contrast standard Bali Coffee with this delicacy of Civet coffee.  

We were fortunate enough to sample a whole host of different varieties of tea and coffee and so here are my opinions on each taste test!

Mangosteen Peel - fruity, but not overly sweet, apparently good for all sorts of ailments including preventing stress, cancer and anti aging - I decided to buy some of this to take home at the end!

Coconut Coffee - Like a syrupy latte that you might get from Starbucks, really sweet, but not too sweet.

Bali Coffee - slightly bitter, a bit like Turkish coffee, but without all the sugar added - grainy finish at the end of the coffee grounds.

Ginger Tea - sweet, much more fiery ginger taste than you usually would expect.

Ginseng Coffee - considered buying some of this - good for male virility and tasted almost similiar in sweetness to the Coconut Coffee.

Lemon Grass tea - loved this one as I love the flavour of lemon grass and it was sweet as we found out they had added sugar to everything!  

Cocoa Spices - similar to the "aztec tea" that they give you to try at Cadbury World - really fiery spice and dark chocolaty flavours.

Lemon Tea - Sweet and sour - nice lemony flavour - I would have bought this as well!

Vanilla Coffee - Again - very similar, but nicer, to a Starbucks latte with vanilla syrup.

Bali Cocoa - chocolatey and not overly sweet - not quite as spicey as the Cocoa spices, a really smooth flavour.

Red Ginger Tea - Similar to the ginger tea, but not quite as fiery.

Luwak / Civet Coffee - So this was nice, smoother and much less bitter than your usual Bali coffee, but the question of whether I would buy it specially or take any home, not for the price as the differentiator wasn't really there.  

We also got to try milk chocolate, vanilla chocolate and orange chocolate - all were lovely flavours, but slightly unusual textures - a bit too gritty and waxy compared to what we are used to in the UK.

Anna has been on the hunt for some wine glasses and with a whole host of glass shops on the route we were driving she got Made to pull over and have a look around, although nothing quite right for what she wanted to pay, but looking at the craftsmanship was really interesting in itself.  

We then reached the Elephant Cave Temple which oddly had a pan-piped version of "My Heart Will Go On" by Celine Dion as we arrived.  I had long trousers on, but Anna had to borrow one of the stock sarongs to be "decent" enough to walk around the temple.  In the temple there was a very shallow pool with lots of huge fish that couldn't even seem to fully submerge themselves in it.  The entrance to the "Elephant Cave" was an ornate, and quite scary looking carving.  Once in the cave it was a heady smell of lots of different types of incense burning in a very enclosed space and it felt almost sophorific - would be good for all sorts of strange thoughts whilst meditating I thought.  The temple was set in quite shelving slopes of jungle, so it gave us a good opportunity for exploring and we passed a few locals including one lady who was naked and having a wash in the stream!

After a brief drive we got to the Holy Water temple - I've been here before, but it's really stunning and I was happy to have a second visit.  There are various jets of water that the idea is that you walk along and pray at each.  People make loads of colourful offerings that run into the water and make a beautiful watery scene and there are even bottles on sale so you can collect your own holy water to take home!

There is a huge fish pool with loads of Koi carp everywhere and the colours make an incredible sight.   I particularly liked the view of the garden where they were washing and drying all the tourist sarongs that you borrow to be able to enter the temple against the lovely lush green rainforesty setting.

They cleverly make you walk back past all the shops to get out of the temple and so you have people running after you offering you all sorts of good bargains and less value for money options - i.e. 1 banana 1 dollar!  I especially liked that they had a Princess Diana head to model one of the kaftans on sale!  Anna bought some carved masks after a bit of negotiation, but I managed to escape without spending any more cash as it's dangerous in Bali as there are so many lovely things you can buy that aren't even tourist tat and they aren't expensive, but I'm on a desperate mission to declutter!

By this point we were pretty hungry and so were pleased to get driven up to Kintamani for lunch!  It was a buffet style lunch, not cheap for Bali at 120,000 rupiah or £6, but it's the price you pay in tourist places and we got to eat whilst looking out over a volcano which you don't get the opportunity to do all that often!

We started the route back to Ubud and stopped off at Tegalug rice terraces - beautiful view that they used in Eat Pray Love I believe and I got a nice picture of a chap working in the rice terraces complete with a hat that was woven from banana leaves!

The last stop on our whistlestop tour - Made crammed in loads for us on the one day! - was to see some white cranes flying over at 6pm to a particular tree - there were loads of them!  They were on time and it was really strange how they all navigate to the same place each day - you can tell that this is the case based on the amount of guano on the ground beneath!

We arrived back to the hotel exhausted from our fun, but busy day and so then it was a quick meal at one of my favourite places in Ubud - Juice Ja where I tried a locally brewed beer called Stark.  I also decided to be naughty and have some ice cream and tried both Pannacotta and Tamarillo ice cream - Pannacotta was pretty much just a very vanilla flavoured ice cream, but Tamarillo definitely tasted as described!