Category: Asia

Indonesia is comprised of about 17,000 islands, and I don’t think anybody (including people living in the country and even the craziest of backpackers) has ever visited all of them to make a comparative analysis.  But based on our very biased and very limited experience of visiting 3 out of these 17,000, we can wholeheartedly say that they are very, VERY different, indeed.

Our next stop was Gili Trawangan, aka “the party island”. The biggest of the 3 tiny spots off the coast of Lombok that at closer inspection of the map turn out to be actual land masses.  Gili Trawangan is specifically known for the absence of any motorized transport – you are welcome to explore it on foot, on bicycle or in a cidomo – a rickety buggy pulled by one of the local tiny but sturdy horses.  Gili Trawangan also boasts to be the smallest island in the world with an Irish Pub.  We did not know that before going, but were sure happy to find out this trivia fact and experience it in person!

All three of the Gili Islands (Trawangan, Meno & Air), are easily reachable by a quick boat ride from nearby Lombok, and by a little less frequent and much longer boat trip from Bali.  We have never looked for easy ways, so arrived on Trawangan from Bali in a throw-up boat through stormy seas.  Somehow most other passengers on the boat either had a very delicate constitution, or heavy hangovers (judging by the looks of many – probably both), and the almost 3-hour ride through the stormy waters of the Lombok straight pushed them to the limit.  By the time we disembarked on Trawangan, we seemed to be the only two standing firmly on our feet.  This definitely gave us advantage in beating the crowds in securing accommodation, as following the nomadic holiday traditions we refused to book anything anywhere in advance, and relied on good luck and chance.

Compared to Bali, Gili Trawangan was tiny, and easily walkable in about 1.5 hours (at a ve-e-e-ery slow pace), and rather un-evenly populated.  All the locals lived in the middle.  All the tourists were on the perimeter, near the beaches.  The Eastern side of the island was overpopulated with the latter, while the Western side was as good as dead, with only a random super-fancy rental condo stuck in the middle of nowhere, or a tiny exclusive resort tucked away in the hedges.  Needless to say, we stayed on the Eastern side, where all life (not all of which could be accused of excessive intelligence) was.

On the day of arrival, we made the same mistake so many visitors to Trawangan do – we turned left from the boat landing spot, and quickly secured a room in the shabby-chick “Buddha Dive Resort” in the middle of the bustling island scene.  Turned out – the bustle never stopped, and the Eastern side of the island was as clearly divided as the island itself – party zone to the left from the boat landing, and a more quiet and relaxed area to the right.  The Irish luck landed us right in the middle of the party zone.  Which was OK for when we wanted to party, but when we wanted to sleep, the super-duper stereo systems of the two night clubs strategically positioned on both sides of the “Budda Dive” did not contribute to the tranquility of the night…

In the bright light of the morning sun our room also turned out to be more shabby than chick, and absence of running water, door handles that had a better grip on your hand than the door, combined with the just experienced night entertainment forced us to search for new accommodation.

There was plenty to be found, and now familiar with the East coast topography, we aimed our gazes at the quieter side of the beach.  After a lazy walk on the main road, we happily moved into a spacious, air-conditioned and relatively modern room at “De Ja Vue” by the Big Bubble diving school to the right from the boat landing.  All our remaining time on the island we lived the way one should – partied on the left, and came back to a comfortable (and quiet) bed on the right.

Tir Na Nog or simply “The Irish” definitely brightened up the bar scene on the island.  At the time of our visit there was not a single Irish person working there, but the food was great, the music good, the local staff fun and quick and the Indonesian-style craic was almost as good as the Irish.  We happened to be on Trawangan on Christmas Eve, and the choice of the place for celebration was really simple – of course, The Irish!  They exceeded themselves with the Christmas grill of all sorts of meat, seafood and vegetables – all freshly cooked, beautifully presented, and absolutely mouthwatering.  The Guinness was in a can, but you can’t have it all – local beer and wine complimented the food just as well!

We finished the Christmas Eve celebrations well past midnight in a random beach bar on the way back to “De Ja Vue” (the name, as well as the location of the bar completely escapes us both, due to hearty celebrations at The Irish) with a great DJ, and well-lubricated clientele.  Several of them unfortunately lingered in our memories for longer than they were welcome to:

• a woman on the wrong side of 50 in a tight dress and high heels that kept sinking in the sand of the beach bar, accompanied by a pimp in a leopard print tank top, sunglasses, track suit pants and dress shoes;
• a completely wasted chubby “mushroom” girl – alcohol alone would NOT have been enough to reach the state of intoxication she was in. She danced by herself and not always to the music that was playing, from time to time smoking a fag, and holding lengthy conversations with her plastic glass of booze, giggling uncontrollably;
• a scary “heroin” girl with bony frame, huge dark circles under her eyes, and a fixed stare aimed at the beer bottle squeezed in her fist. She did no talk to the bottle, just ran across the sandy dance floor from time to time with a determined look on her face;
• a completely pissed guy with Santa’s hat tucked down the front of his trousers. He kept stumbling around, inviting everybody to take a look at Santa and give him a hug or a kiss, but was seriously too wasted to even word this all out in a comprehensible way.

As always, Christmas/New Year parties in Asia did not disappoint!  We fell onto our bed at the early hours of the morning, and slept till midday.

Another great find on Trawangan was “The Banyan Tree” – a vegan café right on the main drag, where we stopped for coffee on the Christmas day, but seduced by the air-conditioned environment and the terrace open to the ocean’s winds, decided to stay for longer and try out the food.  Now, I have to say that “The Banyan Tree” took vegan cooking to an unprecedented height of art – everything we had there tasted fantastic, looked great, and definitely made us change our previously strongly-held believes that vegan food was all raw, plain and ugly…

True to our more or less set tradition of not only eating the local food, but trying to learn how to cook it, we also took the advantage of a cooking class at the Sweet & Spicy cooking school on the island.  This time, it was also a last attempt to if not love, but at least like Indonesian food.  Everything local we had so far boiled down (pardon the pun) to fried rice with this or that additional ingredient thrown in.  We were inclined to (hopefully!) discover that Indonesian cuisine had more to offer.  Having signed up for the class, we turned out to be the only students in the group that evening, and the cooks Tom & Jerry (I shit you not, and sincerely hope those were NOT their real names!) dedicated all their time and attention to just us.  We learned how to cook tofu and tempeh, did the inevitable rice dish, steamed fish in a big banana leaf and put together a sticky bright-green desert that worked out to be surprisingly tasty. 

All that said, with all our work, all the skills, fun & jokes of our two teachers, our faith in Indonesian cuisine was not restored – to us it was still plain, boring, and could not compare with the scents, tastes and spices of Thailand.  Well, “horses for courses” as our friends from the foggy British Isles would say, and the courses on our plates of choice were definitely of a more spicy and fragrant variety.

We had a lovely time on Trawangan, but other destinations were calling, so the time came to leave.  Our departure date coincided with the celebrations of the birthday of Prophet Mohammed, and the locals were running around the island with a mobile mosque.  A little kid, full of himself, basking in the honor and importance of the moment was sitting on top, representing the Prophet.  Definitely an interesting sight, but the boat back to Bali (yuk!) was waiting, so it remained only a fleeting memory.

The boat back was surprisingly non-puking, and although we already braced ourselves for another (just one!) night on Bali, Kuta, where we landed up due to its proximity to the airport, turned out to be a shithole of even more epic proportions that the previously visited Seminyak.  Never again!  We could not escape from Bali fast enough!!!!

The following morning, our escape was clouded by an unexpected and unpleasant surprise.  Having arrived at the airport 3 hours before the flight (Kuta was simply too awful to experience it any longer), for the first time in more than 15 years of travelling, I realized that the tickets we were holding in our hands were for a wrong date.  More precisely – for a week later.  I can’t even claim that I realized it myself – having smugly approached the counter and dropped our bags at check-in desk in relief, we were met with puzzled glances from the airline staff, who politely informed us we were a week early for the flight we were fully intent on boarding.  What the fuck?????….  One more WEEK on Bali?…  No, thank you very much! Death before dishonor!  Anything, but THAT!!!  Mental note to self – booking flights on a cell phone amid the Christmas celebrations in an Irish pub on a remote Indonesian island was probably NOT the best idea…

Fast forward to a (very stressed and sweaty) one hour later – we managed to exchange our tickets to today’s date and the actual flight we were planning to take, for a handy price of $20 at the airline counter at the airport, ditched the luggage at check-in, and like two rabid dogs who only an hour later got a chance to scratch their fleas, sat in the airport sweating, panting, cursing, and taking in the day… Our Nam Air flight was delayed for only for 4.5 hours, so we had more then enough time to catch our breaths, and study the roof and the ceiling of the departure gate long enough to burn holes in them.

The “Let us take a quiet moment to pray together for a safe flight” in the end of the safety lecture on our Nam Air flight was a refreshing (if only slightly disturbing) incorporation into the familiar and stale announcement, and with these hopeful words we took off, direction Labuanbajo.  Giant pre-historic lizards – here we come!

Unlike Singapore that was never on my travel radar, Bali has long been just the opposite – the desired land.  In my imagination, Bali held the seductive appeal of a multi-faceted Paradise!..  The Bali of “Eat, Pray, Love”, a film I reluctantly watched on a sleepless cross-Atlantic flight and loved in spite of my own better judgement, was the lover’s dream, the place to enjoy every moment of one’s being.  The Bali of the original book, which I simply had to read, because “the book is always better” (and it was), made the place even more attractive – it was a place of beauty and peace, where one can find one’s true self.  WikiTravel proclaiming Bali to be “the famed Island of the Gods, with its varied landscape of hills and mountains, rugged coastlines and sandy beaches, lush rice terraces and barren volcanic hillsides all providing a picturesque backdrop to its colorful, deeply spiritual and unique culture, stakes a serious claim to be paradise on earth” only confirmed the fact that we needed to go there NOW.  Pretty much every single travelling friend and acquaintance I talked to have been to Bali and was singing praises to the island.  At some point it started sounding like everyone and their mother have been to Bali, absolutely loved the place, and were raving about it.

Turned out – they were still there…  Making a total mess of this long-lusted for Paradise…

What can I say?…  Either the stars collided and conspired to make the Murphy’s Law especially active at the particular time of the year of our visit, or the modern-day maxim of “Too many fucking disappointments are usually a sign of too many fucking expectations” was to blame, but I had a feeling of having been cheated.

To be fair, not everything we experienced on Bali was horrible, even though we came pretty close…  The flight towards the island was quite nice – on approach from the plane Bali looked green and inviting, the surrounding ocean blue and clean, and all this definitely kindled our hopes to the heights they were not supposed to be at.  The higher you rise, the harder you fall – this definitely applied to our expectations of the place.  Or maybe Bali IS supposed to be admired from afar.  Like the Pyramids of Giza, or Stonehenge, where visitors are not allowed inside.  You feel disappointed at first, but then quickly realize that hordes of enthusiastic and determined tourists flooding to any historic site by the thousand on a daily basis can easily even it to the ground in no time. Not you, of course, but all those other idiots!… This should bring if not gratefullness and serenity, but at least contentment with the state of events.

Getting a little bit ahead of myself here, I have a piece of earnest advice to any visitor to Bali – if you want to like the place, or at least find any resemblance to what you might have imagined about it, you have to make the effort to go as far from the airport as you possibly can.  Do NOT under any circumstance go anywhere near places like Seminyak or Kuta!  That is, if you are not into the cheesy, kitschy version of Asia with throngs of drunk, high and puking tourists crowding the streets, sex and drugs offered openly on every corner, and ear-splitting music blasting out of nightclubs that dominate the landscape and definitely outnumber the palm trees in the area.

Seriously inebriated and barely-clad visitors were stumbling from one bar to another, buying coke and speed from eager street dealers, all the while pushing prams with cases of booze stacked carefully under the screaming offspring trying to reach out to the beer cans strategically positioned in the cup holders.  The proud face of Western civilization – warts and all!…

Having dropped our bags at the hotel, we headed straight to the beach.  To our major disappointment (which suspiciously started setting in as a theme on Bali) it was crowded and VERY dirty.  Plastic bottles, candy wrappers and God knows what were being collected by tractors (!) into huge piles, which the wind readily scattered back all over the sand.  We were so disappointed with the mayhem we saw, that started seriously considering leaving the following morning, regardless of the fact that our hotel was already paid for 2 nights.  We resisted the urge, though, and decided to give Bali a chance (if only a short one, for the already planned 2 nights).  Beer, found in a colorful gypsy bar on the beach definitely helped with calming our tits…  We sat there, sipped our beverages, gasped at the phenomenally beautiful sunset, trying to relax and watch the world go by.

In hindsight, staying put turned out to be the right decision and we glad we did not run away at the first signs of trouble.  We did see some nice parts of the island, and although our faith in Bali was not restored, its reputation was at least partially reinstated.

Some of the irrelevant highlights from the island included the “Wei Tu Fat” shop (I fucking kid you not!), the more mainstream “Holycow Steakhouse”, and the “Rizky Laundry” joint (sometimes you are better off not knowing…) all spotted out of the taxi window on the way from the airport (oh, how I wish we could have stopped at the “Wei Tu Fat”!!!!….).

Numerous statues all over the island were adorned with colorful cloth skirts (really neat!), and made the place look festive.

Another signature sign of Bali was what seemed like billions of roadside shacks selling petrol of suspicious colors not in plastic Sprite bottles (as in the rest of the non-sophisticated Asia!), but in fancy Absolute Vodka glass bottles.  This alone made us doubt whether we came to the right place, for which town/city/island/even fucking country in their right mind goes through THAT much vodka?…  Unless they are buying the empties in bulk from the Swedes, or the Russians…  But that’s way too far to travel for empty bottles, unless said Swedes or Russians make it easier for the locals by coming to Bali on vacation with suitcases full of booze, and still drinking their allotted dozen bottles a week each…  All this is purely a speculation – I honestly have no idea as to why Bali is flooded with empty Absolute bottles.  No matter how they get there, thumbs up for the entrepreneurial spirit of Indonesia, power of Absolute advertisement, or drinking capacity of the Russians/Swedes (or all of the above combined!).  “Making cheap petrol diluted with donkey piss look great again!” should become the new-age slogan for the masses.

Oh, and a guy on a little scooter with 4 (!!!!) huge dogs on it!!!!  This was absolutely epic!  He whizzed past us way too fast for any photo opportunity, but I still admire his sense of balance!

The definite highlight of our short stay on Bali was Ubud.  Home to the Monkey Forest and famous rice terraces, Ubud came as close to the paradise island of my imagination, as the hordes of tourists crowding every square inch of the place would allow…

The Monkey Forest’s major appeal was the tourists being the ultimate minority on premises, and outnumbered at least 10 to one by (yes, you guessed right!) – monkeys!  Monkeys were given free reign and run of the place, and they were everywhere – grooming each other on the benches, lazing on the tree branches, paths and railings in the sun, jumping all over the visitors, and stealing everything that was not nailed down.  Despite the big signs at the entrance, and warnings all over the Internet screaming about NOT bringing food or drinks, every 5^th visitor to the place seemed to have sneaked in snacks for themselves or monkeys, and ended up paying for it.  The sneaky bastards raided every single bag and rucksack they suspected of containing food, jumping all over their owners with complete disregard to mental or emotional state of the latter, or their willingness to be subjected to the first-degree search of their belongings.  The few visitors, who started freaking out and protesting against such treatment, despite having goodies of interest in their bags, were quickly bitten, scratched, or otherwise insulted, disregarded and left alone with their rage. 

Seeing that en mass our human compatriots seemed to be losing in intelligence to our biological ancestors, filled our hearts with unspeakable joy.  All in all – 5 star recommendations, and our ultimate thumbs up to the Monkey Forest!  Just make sure not to bring any food or water with you, for things can get ugly pretty fast.  Just saying…

Ubud also struck us with the sheer number of wood carving shops.  They were everywhere – every second place was a wood carving gallery/shop/whatever, and having walked through the town we can solemnly swear that Ubud has the highest concentration of wood-carving enterprises per square foot anywhere on this planet.  The carvings looked phenomenal, and I guess the supply must be caused or at least supported by the demand, so somebody must actually be buying them. Although for us it was hard to imagine why on Earth would anybody spend a couple hundreds of dollars buying a life-size sculpture of a tiger fighting a giant snake, and then a couple thousand dollars on shipping said sculpture to their place of residence!…  What can I say?….  The intellectual competition keeps being won by monkeys of the Forest at a disturbingly consistent rate…

And coffee!  We were really happy to discover that coffee was really big in Ubud.  Finding a place for a nice espresso or a cappuccino was a no-brainer (and the coffee was really, REALLY good!).  What you also could not help but notice, were the ads for Kopi Luwak all over the place.  The “special” coffee beans, eaten and excreted (yuk!) by an Asian palm civet (a shaggy-looking mix between a rat and a weasel), supposedly adds superfluous flavor to the brew due to it’s being processed through this weird animal’s organism, and is highly priced at 110,000 Indonesian Rupiahs (~$9) for a cup as opposed to 20,000 Rupiahs for a regular cup of espresso (~$2).  Now, why would anybody want to drink something brewed out of the stuff coming from the rat’s ass completely beats me!..  Moreover, if you google Kopi Luwak, pretty much every publicly available source tells you that it tastes disgusting and is completely overrated.  Yet, throngs of tourists can’t wait to try the stuff (mostly because back at home they would be charged ~$80 for a Kopi Luwak espresso, but still…).  As my home-country’s saying goes “Don’t look for logic where you did not put it”…  Another round for the monkeys, it seems…

The rice terraces were not just a tourist show – they were the actual rice patties on a slope of a hill, photographed to death by every visitor to Ubud.  Moreover, you can actually go in there, and walk around the patties, flooded with water, among tiny, stooped, toothless and leather-skinned rice farmers.  Up close and personal, a walk through the rice fields makes you realize how much tedious, raw physical labor is involved in bringing that rice to your table.  It also make you wonder how the most widely consumed staple food of the world is still planted, harvested and threshed by hand.  The sheer amount of manual work needed to produce the average of 700 million tons, consumed by the population of Planet Earth annually is simply unimaginable!…

It took us about an hour and a half to get to Ubud in the early morning hours, and almost 4 to get back to Seminyak crawling through the absolutely fucked up afternoon traffic.  Way too many people on the island!…  Time to rid it of at least two and move on. 

Next stop – Gili Trawangan!