Indonesia and the Gili Islands

I thought I should go from the general to the specific.  We went to Indonesia, to the Gili Islands, for an Easter break. I thought it might be interesting for you if I tried first to contextualise this all.  Indonesia is big in a number of ways.  A 2002 survey from space found that the it has 18,307 islands.  Of these just over 6,000 are inhabited.  It is the largest Islamic country on earth, with a population of just under 250 million.  The capital is Jakarta with a population of 10 million and some very very bad traffic.

The closest airport to where we were going was on the island of Lombok - which with some scrutiny 

you will find centre bottomish in the map above.  As you can see from the map below, to get to the

Gili islands you have to get from the airport to the coast - about a two hour trip.  The scenery outside the many small towns is much like this on the left, rice paddies and seriously incredible jungle.  Its also quite hilly, so at times you wind along some very cool roads through mountain jungle with the odd little shop here and there.  Once you get to the right spot on the coast you  then get a public boat from there to Gili Trawangan, which takes a further 40 minutes

odd.  Below you can see what the boat looks like - pretty basic stuff, all sorts of cargo, bags of cement, carts, crates of beer and cooldrinks etc.  This is how it all gets to the island.  We were

shafted on the ticket prices, but this sort of thing doesn't happen too much to us any more as we've got a bit more travel "wys".  Still, mildly annoying, not so much for the cost - which was insignificant - just for the frustration of the BS of it all.  Certainly corruption is rife, which is also always a bore.

The islands themselves look like this from the air - not my picture of course - but what you can see on this one is that they have these fringes of coral reef, which then drop off steeply into deeper water.  I suspect this photo is a little doctored, but the colours in real life are arresting.

As I said, not my pic, but gives you a pretty good idea ... special place

 

Early morning on Gili T

Mid day shot of Gili Air

There are no cars or motorcycles on the islands, so you get around by walking, hiring bikes to ride, or taking a horse cart.  The main road of the island looks like this below - pretty basic, lots of stuff catering to dive tourism, in particular sea turtles (of which we saw many).

 I went snorkeling with the boys all mornings but one - it was just fantastic- coral, loads of fish, a variety of sea turtles, a massive ray, barracuda etc.  We hired a boat with glass panels in the bottom which was really cool, and went to a number of different places on the reefs of all three islands - it was seriously cool.  Aiden and Ev saw a black marlin - one of the guys who ran the boat told them what it was - and that is a pretty amazing thing to see outside a couch-delivered documentary programme.

Aiden and Ev cruising towards Gili Air after a good snorkel off Gili Meno

Cool pic of Angie, love all the colours together.

Lunch on Gili Air - very cool beach restaurant - and as I said at the beginning - seriously fantastic water and colours.

This is a close up of the shore on Gili T - it is an amazing depth of small pieces of dead coral.

On the way home we stayed at some rooms at the Singapore yacht club - just loved the 80's colours and curtains - and really really like this photo.

As a round-off, this is a photo of some graffiti on a wall on Gili T - I'm offering a prize for any sensible suggestions as to what it means or what on earth is going on.