Lickable Wallpaper

So from Ubud we went on to Gili Trawangan, one of the Gili islands northwest of Lombok (the island next to Bali). We spent almost a week there and I spent the first four days doing an SSI Open Water Diving course. It was good; all theory and pool sessions for the first two days, then four dives over the last two days. I actually nearly bottled it on the morning of my first dive, I got a bad attack of the nerves about some of the tasks we had to do, but my instructor was very encouraging and calm and convinced me to at least get into the water and see how I felt.

So I did and it was grand! I must be getting old – I did an introductory dive about six years ago in Crete and wasn’t nervous at all. Anyway, we saw loads and loads of turtles and lots of other colourful reef fish and then on the third dive we saw a shark so that was cool. Eddie came with us on that one, it was nice to have him there (both as boyfriend and as a back-up instructor)! I really enjoyed that one. So I am now a diver and will be able to dive to 18m with any dive centre. I wouldn’t be that big into it really, there’s no adrenaline rush to it, you just float along looking at stuff, so to be honest I can’t see myself doing that much of it other than at the really good dive sites where there’s lots to see. Maybe I’ll change my mind as I do a bit more. The next place we’ll be diving is in Sipadan in Borneo, so I’m looking forward to that one as apparently there’s loads to see, so it should keep me amused!

We didn’t do much else on the island, other than relaxing and eating, but we could have stayed longer doing very little, it’s a relaxing kind of place! There are a lot of bars and cafes around the place and a lot of people head there for the nightlife (and the readily available drugs), but it’s not a hectic place at all. The food was really good, I had fresh fish every night! We also saw Sex and the City at the mini cinema (a big screen and lots of floor space) where they showed recent releases as long as the electricity was running – it went off a lot! We saw Iron Man too – absolute crap, I actually fell asleep in the middle. I’d heard from some friends that Gili Trawangan was a really gorgeous, relaxed place but over the past couple of years it has become quite developed for tourists and overall, although we enjoyed ourselves (particularly the last few days when we upgraded our accommodation to Martha’s), I wouldn’t rate it that highly. So we were glad to get back on the boat after our time was up and excited to board another boat, on our Perama ‘Hunting Kimodo by camera’ trip.

Tags: Diving, Gili Trawangan, Indonesia

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This entry was posted on Saturday, July 12th, 2008 at 4:16 am and is filed under Indonesia. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.