Lombok was the perfect capstone, both for our month in Indonesia, and also our global tour more generally. First, the Indonesia part. As noted in a prior post, Bali had been the ideal entry point for exploring the country, but it also felt bastardized – Indonesia as the travel industry thought Western tourists wanted to see it. Borneo was so thoroughly off the grid that it was not even obvious we were in Indonesia. Java was fascinating and fun but didn’t, at times, feel intensely Indonesian. In a mostly Muslim country, the signature moments were at Hindu and Buddhist temple complexes, followed by time walking around the vibrant and cosmopolitan Jogja.
Then we landed in Lombok. Right away, it felt different. Lombok is known as the “Island of a Thousand Mosques,” and that much was plain from the start. During our descent into Lombok’s tiny airport, and then on our drive up toward the Gili islands off Lombok’s northwestern edge, I quickly lost count of the dozens and dozens of minarets sticking up out of rice paddies, town centers, garbage dumps, roughly every half kilometer. All the schoolboys making their way home wore the Indo equivalent of a fez. All women were in jilbabs, the Indonesian equivalent of a hijab. If we learned anything during our month in Indonesia, it’s that the country is a coat of many, many colors. And yet, my sense is that Lombok is probably closer to the modal scene than the select spots among the country’s 15,000 islands we had visited to that point.
So I was glad to see something of the interior of Lombok from a car and wished we could have spent more time exploring the towns we passed through. But we were in Lombok for beach time to close out our entire trip, first in the Gili islands, then down to the surfing paradise that is Ekas Bay at the island’s southern tip. And the Gili leg started with a surreal experience. After a couple hours of driving, we arrived at a “harbor” and waded out to a speedboat that would take us to our island spot on Gili Meno, the smallest and least populated of the three Gilis. As we headed out into a choppy sea – the speedboats from Bali had been canceled for days – a blazing sunset was in front of us.
Behind us, as we bounced over the waves, was a stunning full moon rising up over the misty mountains.
The “harbor” at Gili Meno was closed, and so the boat driver pulled up near a beach and helped us get our bags through the surf, then pointed up the way to a few lights. We headed off, carrying our shoes while “rolling” our two slightly larger duffles through the deep sand. We arrived at our seaside hotel sweaty and out-of-breath but quickly got set up in our rooms, then had dinner as the sunset turned volcanic, of sorts, with the fading light highlighting the thin trail of smoke that constantly leaks from Mount Rinyani off in the distance.
Gili Meno is beautiful. It’s the least developed of the three Gili islands. Indeed, a billboard at the Bali airport quite clearly directs tourists to the other two – Gili T and Gili Air.
On Gili Meno, there are no motorized vehicles allowed, only bikes and horsecarts, and there are little makeshift swings and other delights everywhere you look.
That said, Gili Meno was never going to be my cup of tea. Beach vacations make me antsy. But it proved the perfect capstone for our entire trip. Nora and Elliot are never happier than at a beach spot. Elliot, after some pool time to master a mask and snorkel, really enjoyed the “fish safaris” on the reefs just offshore. Nora snorkeled with Elliot, drank wine, read books, took long walks, and reflected on our travels. And best of all, for our middle-schooler-to-be who was by far the most homesick among us at various points on the trip, our time on Gili Meno was a bright, shining, triumphant moment. I convinced Connor to try scuba with me, and he was wary but game. I hadn’t been diving since Nora’s and my last trip around the world, in Fiji, to be exact. So I needed a refresher course in order to update my certification, and Connor could only dive as part of a “discover scuba” package. We both completed the program, including a video and pool session, followed by a relatively shallow dive with the energetic and all-around lovely PADI instructor, Sara. Connor loved it – so much so that we decided to extend our time at the resort, thus eating the first night of our next stop in southern Lombok, so he could complete a full certification course the next day.
It’s hard to imagine a better-tailored challenge for our alpha, athletic-but-studious, hyper-rule-following eleven-year old. We dropped him off at the Divine Divers dive shop – a hut a couple hundred yards up from our resort – at 8:30 the next morning for a full eight hours of instruction, including a school-like “theory” module, a much longer pool session than the day before, and then a certification dive. I looked in just before lunch and got this shot of Connor working away at one of the written tests.
Later that afternoon, I joined the certification dive for fun, at the aptly named Turtle City dive site a few minutes out into the ocean. Giant turtles were zooming by us every which way – some surfacing for air, others diving back down to deeper spots along the reef wall, others crossing in front of us – and I quietly gawked at them off to one side while Connor and Sara ran through the various skills at the sandy bottom next to the reef. Here are some underwater photos shot by an instructor with a GoPro. (In the interest of full disclosure, these shots are not from our Gili Meno dive, but a dive we did ten days later, in Hawaii, during our three-day stop-off before heading home to California. But the overall scene at Turtle City was, if anything, even more incredible.)
Connor, having scored 95 or 100 on the various written tests (did I manage those scores when I did it?) similarly passed the underwater skills tests with flying colors, and Sara would later pull Nora aside and explain that, not only had Connor performed at a ridiculous level, as compared to the hundreds of other kids she had trained, but she had grown quite attached to him. (“A really cool kid,” was her parent-heart-exploding summation.) Here are some triumphant photos after the dive, as Connor filled out the info for his new PADI card and recorded everything he had seen in his new dive log.
Gili Meno was an ideal trip capstone in a second sense. On our second morning on the island, before any of the scuba triumphs, we were jolted out of bed by the largest earthquake I’ve ever felt: a shallow, 6.4 earthquake just 40 or so miles to the east. It lasted a good ten seconds – long enough, in fact, to make me feel a little seasick. Once it was over, we sprang into action in light of the fact that we were on a small island in the land of tsunamis. (In the last large tsunami to hit Indonesia, in 2004, a stunning 160,000 Indonesians perished.) We quickly donned running shoes and stuffed a pair of backpacks with water bottles, our emergency cache of snickers bars, our passports, all our cash, etc. But the resort staff soon came round and reported that no tsunami warning had issued, and we used what little wifi the resort had to confirm that fact. Here’s a picture, with Connor putting on a brave face as we huddled in the courtyard plotting a quick move to the center of our tiny island – which, truth be told, would have been useless.
It was scary – and it was then, I think, that we all realized it was time to head home. Over the course of four months of often quite adventurous travel, we had (mostly) dodged an array of travel bullets, during patently unsafe bike rides in Delhi and Tuscany, a bout of dysentery in India that nearly put me in the hospital, my stinging-nettle-faceplant in Nepal, five days in the jungle in Borneo abuzz with disease-carrying mosquitoes, and hours upon hours of driving in chaotic traffic on crappy roads with drivers of uncertain skill. The travel gods had smiled down upon us. To extend our trip beyond our last stop, in southern Lombok, I thought to myself as we sat in the courtyard, was to risk angering them and tempting fate. This would hit home even more powerfully once we were safely in Sydney, Australia for a long layover on our way home to California via Hawaii and we learned that Lombok had suffered a second, much larger earthquake that was even closer to the Gili islands. Here’s a screenshot of the New York Times story, featuring a video of the evacuation effort at one of the Gilis:
A final note on our final stop: We spent our last few days in Indonesia at Heaven on the Planet, a surfer resort at the southern end of Lombok. It almost requires a four-wheel-drive vehicle to get there, and the ride in was plenty painful, but it proved to be one of our more memorable stays.
For starters, Heaven sits atop the bluffs overlooking some of the best surfing in Indonesia (indeed, the world). And it’s charmingly luxurious and rustic in equal measure, with a lovely lodge and pool area, but villas scattered along the cliffs with little AC (and too many ornery monkeys to open up the doors and windows at night) and virtually no hot water or water pressure in the bathroom. Because it’s so remote, it’s necessarily an all-inclusive place, which I would normally avoid like the plague. But the staff will cook up anything from the extensive menu at any time and then come find you with it, all without a pesky bill to sign. Order a bottle of wine, and it goes into the communal fridge with your name on it, and it’s available to you at any time.
In addition, the Heaven clientele is small – the resort can hold only 20 or so people – and, at least when we were there, was composed almost entirely of well-to-do Australian men who, to a person, were fun to talk to (what Aussie isn’t?) and could not have been nicer to Connor and Elliot, especially during the pingpong tournament Connor and Elliot helped to organize on our last night. (Speaking of, Heaven could easily rename itself “The Greatest Concentration of Pingpong Talent on the Planet,” but that’s another story.)
The Aussies, however, are there to surf, and it was also fun to watch them gather at the bar in the evening and watch the day’s surfing highlights up on a screen – shot in stop-action mode with a camera with a huge zoom lens – and cheer the great moves and dish out ridicule for the flops.
Best of all, however, were the beaches. The Aussie surfers head to the distant inner and outer breaks when the surf is up – which is almost always.
That meant duffers like us have the beach break just below the resort almost entirely to ourselves. (Note Mount Rinyani, now viewed from the other side, poking up out of the clouds.)
As a result, we spent our final three days in Indonesia virtually alone on a stunning beach. Here’s a shot of Connor and me heading out into the waves with our surfboards, and Elliot doing the same with a boogie board, at sunset.
Here’s one of Connor walking down an empty beach for a session with Heaven’s resident surf instructor.
Here’s a sandcastle session afterward.
And here’s the obligatory shot of us pretending to be real surfers.
It was a fitting end to our trip, which was filled with so many other unique, otherworldly experiences.
Fanatical Sabbatical 