G&T in Bali and Lombok, Day 1-21

We spent 21 days in Bali and Lombok and it already felt like being away for months. How can this be? Maybe because we saw so much in such short time, maybe because the islands are so different, one Hindu, one Muslim, one with a parallel universe of super chique tourism next to very basic farming villages, the other struggling to get tourism off the ground after it had been hit by racial tensions in 2000.

We started in Padangbai Bali, a small seaside village and the jump off point for ferries to Lombok. The best hotel in town - with 3 swimming pools and massive rooms - was our resting point for the first days. It is amazing, but you can easily stay in famous Lonely Planet `mid range accommodations`, eat and drink as much as you want, and still don`t spend any money (see Timo`s price index below).

After adjusting to the constant approach by local hawkers who will sell you anything, but most frequently `transport`, `sarong`, `massage` and only give up if you strongly decline their offer several times (ignoring won`t help at all), we decided to rent a scooter for a week. With our own set of wheels we discovered lovely rice paddies, an amazing variety of shades of green, lovely small villages with literally no tourists, volcanic mountains often hiding in the clouds and fantastic small seaside towns with excellent snorkeling off the beach.

The underwater life in Bali and Eastern Indonesia is amazing! There are so many varieties of corals, so many fish, including Lion fish and we even saw Hawksbill turtles. On the down side, there is no concept of trash collection, all waste is still burnt. A lot of it also ends up in the ocean and we saw a lot of trash floating in the open water. If Indonesia will not tackle this problem, it could severely affect their tourism, who wants to snorkel with plastic bags? On the other hand, Indonesia has a lot of other problems and I guess, rubbish collection is one of their last priorities.

We also spent a few days in the famous artist town of Ubud. We found it more touristy than arty and you have to look very closely to find real art, nevertheless, the surrounding landscape is very lovely and the Balinese dance and Gamelan orchestra we saw was enchanting.

On a very rusty old Ferry (a big thank you to our parents that they gave us swimming lessons) we tackled the 7h journey to Sengiggi in Lombok. From there our 5 day `Komodo hunting adventure tour`(that is what the brochure said) started. With 20 Dutch, one Swiss, three Australians and three French, we boarded a very small ship where Timo and I were lucky to have the best room on the upper level away from the engine noise and fumes. After a day adjusting to be on a moving vessel we really enjoyed the frequent snorkeling stops and of course we were thrilled of seeing the Komodo dragons. They are amazing creatures, with elephant like skin and hawks like claws. They look friendly and almost lazy, but can speed They look friendly and almost lazy, but can speed up to 1 and almost lazy, but can speed up to 18kmph and feed of creatures such as waterbuffaloes. The five stays went by in a fly and we really loved the under water life around the islands, though not the stingers that attacked Gislind.

Back in Lombok we could not resist of renting another scooter to explore the country side and further beaches in Southern Lombok. Again we found it really striking that outside the few tourists spots we hardly met any other tourists and that is probably why we liked driving around so much. The last two days of our trip we spent on a nice little backpacker island called Gili Air where we had the luxury of a two storey house with hammocks and daybeds on the second floor right next to the beach, and guess what it cost less than 20 AUD.

On our last day we boarded the shortest flight in our life: 17 minutes from Lombok to Denpasar Bali and spent a couple of hours in Bali`s major tourist town Kuta. We didn`t expect much of tourist town Kuta. We didn`t expect much of that place, but it was even worse than what we imagined it to be: no nice beach, loads of people, plenty of hawkers, busy congested roads and teenagers on the loose, etc you get the picture. One good thing was that we interviewed a German restaurant owner for our Leibspeise food project.

We nearly had the opportunity to extend our stay in Indonesia, as Garuda Airlines refused us to check us in for Tokyo at around 11pm due to the fact that we had no outgoing ticket from Japan. After a lot of hassle, we had to purchase a refundable ticket and made it just in time on our flight to Tokyo.

In a nutshell, it was the perfect start for our one year trip as it was very easy to travel around and we felt very relaxed from day one on.