Gili Islands

After leaving Nusa Lembongan, my buddy Sam and I headed to Lombok Island, which is just west of Bali. Lombok is a lot less touristy and is part of the muslim area of Indonesia. After passing through Sigiggi, we then headed directly to the Gili Islands. Ended up spending some time at the Legend Bar on Gili Air and then moved to Gili Trawahan. Gili Air is a super chill spot with these awesome little hut thingys all along the beach. We pretty much lived like Kings there for 3 days. The fish there was awesome. One night our menu consisted of four fish sitting on the table and we just got to point to which one we wanted for dinner that night (had a pretty cool pic of it but lost it). We got a pretty good laugh out of it.

We hooked up with a cool Cdn/US couple named Trav and Jessie, and also a big group of locals from the Lazy Bar. That allowed us to get some of the local prices too which was nice. Once night we paid $2 which basically paid for all of us (7) to have a huge seafood feed. Not a bad deal.

The locals here absolutely love the guitar. Everytime I haul it out, they all crowd around and try to sing along to the main songs that they've heard. I was sitting in a small terminal building waiting for a ferry the other day and I played a song that one of the security guards had a CD of. I didn't realize it at first, but Sam noticed that when I stopped playing, he could still here them all singing in the background. They eventually flocked over and tried to talk me into playing over the PA system! Ha. How funny is that. The greatest part is, is that Guns N' Roses are HUGE here. As most of you know, I grew up on that stuff and can play pretty much every track. Good way to make friends. I had a cool video of me playing on the roof of a ferry with a bunch of locals on the way over to Nusa Lembongan. Was one of my favorite videos but unfortunately, I think that it may have been lost to that damn virus.

I love watching the local bands here.....some of them are awesome. The greatest part is that they don't have a clue what any of the lyrics are, but they still belt out the songs at full tilt. It is pretty funny to watch. I requested a Nirvana track and it was hilarious listening to what this guy thought the words were. Truthfully though, I probably couldn't tell you either.

After leaving the Gilis, we headed back to the southern part of Lombok island, to Kuta Lombok. Found some stellar surf here. The coolest part too, was how we got to the surf. We had to rent scooters, drive through some stellar scenery and some little villages, and then hire one of the local guys to take us out to the reef on their boat. Most of the guys would just sit in the boat and wait for us to finish but some of the younger ones would jump in and surf with us too.

One of the days there, we decided to take the bikes and head down the coast to see what else we could find. The drive basically consisted of cruising through these mountains and looking out over the coast. Everytime we saw a beach that looked nice, we would take the dirt track in to the village and see what it was like. Everyone of them were spectacular, and all were pretty secluded from tourists. You could tell because the locals were so stoked about seeing us. We had one giant group of school kids come running over at one point, but they were all interested only in our friend Jessie. I guess they aren't that used to seeing white girls.

When we left one of the villages, Jessie had realized that she lost the key to her bike somewhere along the way. Her boyfriend Trav and I decided to go back and take a look for it. As soon as people saw two white guys wondering around looking for something, the whole village came out to see what was going on. After we realized that we weren't going to find it, we decided to offer all the kids a cash reward if they found the 'cunchee' (the key). That got their attention pretty quickly. The parents also seemed to get pretty interested by it as well. I'll tell you, if those people didn't find it, then the key wasn't meant to be found. Unfortunately I had to head back to Kuta, so I don't know if they ever did find it.

Anyway, after leaving Lombok. I headed back to Bali and then flew to Jakarta. That was definitely a contrast to the peacefulness of Lombok. Almost 10 million people. The island of Java has about $130 million people on it and is considered to be the most densely populated island in the world. After a couple of days there, I caught a flight to Bangkok, Thailand, which is where I am now.

Unfortunately I have been sick in bed for the past 5 days, but hoping to be better soon. Will come up with a new plan once I start feeling better. Anyway, as I said before, Sam's camera got a virus, so the 350 pics that we took may be gone which really sucks. I guess that you'll have to use your imaginations!

Bye for now.