Sorry for the Group Email

Our hotel in Kuta was lovely. The pool was deep blue, clean and refreshing. Our room was large and shady, and the New Yorker installed next to us was surfing his way around the world.

Oh, and there was a scorpion in the bathroom.

When we left London, I was afraid of anything with more legs and eyes than me. Spiders, scorpions, even crabs and lobsters, held a kind of fascinating, paralysing terror that was all-consuming. Since sleeping in a cave in Malaysia with God knows what running all over us, I’ve been rather more relaxed about the whole thing, and so we regarded Scorpy with a kind of intrigue, rather than clawing at each other to see who could get into the carpark first.

Scorpy was a tiny little fellow. He moved exactly like a larger scorpion, but he was sand-yellow, and seemed entirely content to stick to the wall, waiting for even tinier prey to wander in his direction. We eyed him warily for five minutes, then decided he’d sort himself out. Sure enough, in the morning he was gone.

Like much of Lombok, Kuta was more or less deserted. What few tourists there were were sources of utter fascination to the locals. We ate in restaurants where waiters positively fell over themselves in their rush to serve us, and took a day trip in our Jimny to beachside villages to which no-one apparently ever went.

We were in Kuta for two nights, and spent our time swimming happy laps in the pool, driving up and down the coast, and doing very little else. Southern Lombok is stunningly beautiful. We saw beaches that were literally deserted, despite a mile of golden sand in either direction and seawater of such an inviting, milky blue that it was almost impossible not to throw caution to the wind and to leap in. We drove our car along dusty beach roads and over huge potholes; to our surprise, it bounced over each one with ever-increasing conviction.

We left Kuta and drove north to Senggigi to leave our car.

We spent a single night in Senggigi and then, for US$5 each, we hopped into a minibus and drove to the sea. From there we loaded ourselves and our gear into a boat and headed for Gilli Trewangen.

“Gilli” is Indonesian for “island”, but “the Gillis” are a trio of tiny patches of land off the northwest shore of Lombok. The largest, Gilli Trewangen, is home, according to the Lonely Planet, to 800 permanent residents.

There would be very little on Gilli Trewangen if it wasn’t for the tourists. There are no major cultural centres or temples, just a long parade of hotels and guesthouses, restaurants and dive centres.

It was bliss.

After five months of near-constant movement on horrible buses, cockroach-infested hotels and occasionally bad food, being on an island where there was nothing to do but relax was splendid. We ate at good restaurants every day, and our US$10 hotel had air-conditioning, a fridge and an enclosed, roofless toilet and shower combo. We spent our time shopping for cereal and stocked our fridge with beers that cost US$1.65. We made friends with a lady who ran a second-hand bookshop and went through four paperbacks in two days.

We hired a snorkel and mask for US$2 a day.

Like surfing, snorkelling was something I’d tried in the UK. I tried it when I was a skinny 12 year-old and, if memory serves, I had a go on the Isle of Wight. The water was dark and murky and colder than the moon. I was in the water for all of four seconds before I realised I was about to die a chilly and speedy death, and headed back to the video arcade.

Like surfing, snorkelling was an utter revelation. No sooner was my face in the water than I was disturbing a shoal of hundreds of tiny, silver fish, which darted about as if with a single mind. Less than eight feet under the surface sat coral-covered rocks, about which chaotically-covered fish swam. I couldn’t believe it. Actual fish!

I always thought, rather naively, that people who saw fish when they went diving had enjoyed a moment of freak coincidence. Now I realised belatedly that coral simply equals sealife, and I was swimming with it. I looked for Nemos (circus fish to those not acquainted with the finest marine adventure ever animated) but couldn’t see any. I did see those blue round ones (Dorys, for FN fans) and the ones that talk with a New York accent. There were hundreds of the things, and I swam for hours in a happy daze, occasionally inhaling giant lungfuls of water in my efforts to get closer to the fish and re-emerging on the surface to the alarm of nearby swimmers, coughing and spluttering, before inhaling deeply and diving again.

Otherwise, we lay on the beach. We read, and ate, and relaxed. It was everything a holiday should be, and if the Gilli islands weren’t so far away I’d suggest you go there immediately.

Dave is thinking scuba diving next.