Spent from 17th June until the 9th July here and on the gilis. So, a good chunk of the holiday wandering around, climbing mountains, getting drunk and chilling on the beach. That’s in addition to other activities. There’s certainly no storage of things to occupy your time here on Lombok and the gili’s.
By the gili’s, I mean Gili Trawanga, Gili Air and Gili Meno. I visited all these islands, although only Gili Meno briefly when I swam over from Gili Air. Had a glass of water then swam back. In the dark, that turned out to be not such a good idea.
Lombok island had different stop overs for me and I’ll look at these in the order that I visited them.
Senggigi
After I got off the ferry from Bali, Sengigi was the 1st choice to stop. The port, Bang Sal, looked very functional and didn’t have much appeal when I read about it. Even less when I actually visited.
In the past, Sengigi was the number one resort on Lombok. That must have been some time ago, because now it is empty and boring a lot of the time, at least when I visited. There didn’t seem to be very much in way of visitors. It still has all the hotels, bars and restaurants, which gives it a Morecambe-esque feel to it.
Most of the foreign types were expats, mainly from Aus, who now lived in the locality. One approached me at the convenience store, he didn’t seem very lucid. Looked at me in a confused way and asked a lot of questions. I visited Sengigi again on a separate visit to extend my visa, I got talking to another Aussie. He was a bit more compos mentis, able to understand jokes and such like. He’d run a business locally which had got shut down by COVID. We chatted about various stuff. He gave me the low-down on where to go for a drink in the locality and some other local gen.
The best place I found was called Le Chill Bar. They had nice bean bags, good food and decent music, a chill vibe and the staff were friendly.
Whilst I was eating dinner there on my first night, this turtle came up the beach and started laying it’s eggs on the beach around 10yards from my table!
Continue reading “Senggigi and Eastern Gilli’s – Lombok”