Gili Islands

We left Bali for a few days and headed over to Gili Trawangan, one of the 3 Gili islands off the coast of Lombok - the island just east of Bali in Indonesia.

Instead of taking the 5 hour ferry boat, we spent a few extra $$ and took a "fast boat" arriving in just over 90 minutes. We use the term fast boat very loosely, this boat was hardly speedy. But faster and safer than the ferry, so it's all relative.

Gili means "small island" and small they are. No motorized vehicles are allowed on the island so transportation consists of horses and wagons:

We hadn't booked a hotel so we had the driver take us to a place we had read about on the internet. After deciding it wasn't for us, we let him take us to a place he thought we'd like better and it was a thousand times better. The villa was amazing! Two large bedrooms with outdoor bathrooms + shower, large kitchen, and our own private pool. Perfect for the 4 of us. Funny, we thought, "Oh cool, we can make our own dinner in our fabulous kitchen!" Only to realize a) supermarkets are few and far between in Bali and b) restaurant food is really cheap. We killed that plan pretty quickly.

We went into town for lunch, booked a snorkel tour for the following day, and took it easy the rest of the afternoon. The town is basically one main dirt road along the side of the beach so it didn't take long to see the island:

Most of the larger restaurants in town do a barbeque-type fare for dinner - you pick your fish or steak and they prepare it for you. We ended up at Scallywags, a restaurant started by an Australian and prides itself on fresh fish flown in daily and great organic salads. We were not disappointed.

And we didn't have to eat rice! Or noodles!

The following day, we had another lazy morning and went on a snorkeling expedition in the afternoon. We took one of these glass-bottom boats to a few coral spots - no joke, we think our driver was about 8 years old. Really wish we would have taken a picture.

He took us to a spot known off the coast of the neighboring island known for sea turtles, so we jumped right in. Only to realize we were surrounded by hundreds of small jellyfish! Even though they were harmless and just gave us little stings, it was not pleasant so we drove over to a few other spots and looked at some fish and coral. We asked the driver to take us back to the turtle area to see if we could spot one through the glass-bottom - luckily enough, we saw two.

We went back to Scallywags for dinner and packed up our bags as we were leaving the next morning.