Island Paradise

I arrived on Gili Trawenga on a dive boat of all things, having booked in with a dive company offering free transportation to the island and accommodation in Sengiggi, Lombok where I stayed two nights.  I suppose it’s appropriate actually because my time on Gili T and all of the islands I visited in Southeast Asia have focused on my newest hobby – diving.  To quote (haphazardly) my brother after I got my dive ticket in Australia, ‘That’s never something I though you would do,’ and although I was a bit offended at the time, I have to admit he was right.  I went to Australia to learn to surf, not dive, but diving is what stuck.  [I don’t have the upper body strength to surf].  Something about seeing a whole new world open to you is breathtaking, especially when each new place I dive has something new or interesting to appreciate.

Hovering not five meters from a five foot White tip Reef Shark tends to demand all your attention

I know that I’m babbling on and this isn’t much of a story (more a diary entry) but just bare with me.  I promise I’ll get somewhere or I won’t post it. 

I chose Gili Trawenga of the three islands on the northwest coast of Lombok simply known as the Gilis (despite all the islands off Lombok being named Gili something or other), because it was the most modern and had more of a social life than Gili Air or Gili Meno.  That’s saying something for somewhere Lonely Planet advises has no ATMs.  On my last day after scrimping by on the less than adequate (given island prices) supply of cash I’d brought with me, I found they had made a giant leap forward in the last year since the book was printed, having installed an ATM at one of the new resorts.  All I could do was curse my laziness for not having walked the two hours circumnavigating the island earlier.  In a way, it’s a little sad because it’s a sign of the development that is currently going on.  On my walk I saw no less than three new resorts being built.  Although I’m sure it will be good for the island economy, I have to wonder if it will lose the laidback vibe that is currently as big of a draw as the diving or the beaches. 

It didn’t matter much if this was the most social of the three islands because my social skills had gone up in a puff of smoke without a hostel common room to facilitate a conversation, so I spent most of my nights at the restaurant/bar that offers free movies with every purchase.  Eating a curry lying down on a plastic mattress with a bedroll at one end while trying not to obstruct the view of the five or six rows behind you makes for an interesting evening even if the pirated movie of choice doesn’t.  I couldn’t even use my diving to meet people because the company was based on the mainland so no one else I met was staying on the island. 

Whenever I was in the water though I forgot about whatever was or was not happening on land.  Hovering not five meters from a five foot White tip Reef Shark tends to demand all your attention, even if they are one of the more docile of the species.  It wasn’t until after I bought four dives, I read in Lonely Planet that the coral had been bleach due to an El Nino phenomenon.  In some ways, my worst fears were realized when two of my four dives were practically coral graveyards, but the new life in dancing soft corals was a little bit of hope clinging onto the hillsides of death.  The color of the remaining coral stood like a lighthouse in the dark of night compared to the bleached pastels surrounding it.  The ripest of tomato reds and golden yellows were still vibrant ten meters below where most color becomes muted by the filter effect seawater has.  The sheer size of things like the turtles feeding whose shells were three to four feet across made up for the disappointing coral.  At Manta Point, the current mixed the warm water of the islands with that coming in from the straight.  The cold water shimmered before me like I was about to step through a waterfall, seeing only blurred images on the other side.  Although I’ve since learned the difference in temperature in the thermal channels was probably only a couple of degrees Celsius, it made me shiver in my short wetsuit to pass through each so I tried my best to avoid them despite their mysterious beauty. 

In Malaysia, on the Perenthian Islands, I was taken by the amount of new things and species I saw.  Long wire coral swayed in the water, growing like sparse weeds directly from the rocks stacked up on top of each other at the Three Reefs dive site.  I realized how much my youth, in this case my grandfather’s fishing, has affected my frame of mind when I thought I saw a large Northern in salt water, only to realize that the long striped silver fish with its rows of teeth was really a Barracuda.  A fish about the size and shape of a large matchbox with a rounded canvas of yellow with black spots stretched around it turned out to be a Box fish.  A Bat fish, which one of my dive buddies said looks like an alien, was another first in real life.  Their front is rounded with their eye roughly halfway down the arc, with two bright yellow fins hanging down like whiskers from their chin and three separate fins squared off the back.  Although I had seen Nudibranchs before, the variety of size my dive master found was impressive, ranging from babies you could easily miss attached to the coral walls to larger than I’ve ever seen, roughly the size of a black and purple upside down oval tea saucer with orange spots. 

Going through a small swim through with my buoyancy a little a miss due to using one less weight than usual, I cut my left wrist on the coral wall.  I didn’t notice until I saw a small whisk of something coming out of my skin.  It looked black and I thought it was a piece of algae.  I started to squeeze at the base of it trying to get it out.  More curled from my wrist as I realized it was liquid.  I irrationally thought the swirls were some kind of ink, like a squid may use, that had been somehow injected when I hit the coral.  In a small back corner of my brain I remembered from some middle school science class that blood isn’t red until it reacts with something in the air.  Whether it was due to the science of the missing element or the filter effect of the seawater, I bled black for the first time. 

On the next day’s dive at the Temple of the Sea, the firsts continued, but in less dramatic ways, with long bodied and snouted flute fish, coral that looks like a cross between a pillow and a star fish, and a Moray Eel with its long thick snakelike form with a fin along the top actually moving through the water.  A Blue Spotted Ray actually with a green body with blue spots and its gills were surrounded with golden orbs that looked like eyes.  Large schools of fish rolled with the water like one larger organism sitting beneath a shelf coral and bolting as one when someone got too close.  The most unusual of all was a small blue fish I would have likely overlooked next to its more vibrant tropical cousins if it hadn’t been laying on its side, rubbing itself against the rocks like a cat against a rocking chair. 

On land, here I shared a hut with two girls I had met on the bus off all places, Annick from the Netherlands and Hannah from Wales.  The island, like Gili T had no ATM, but unlike the occasional blackouts previously experienced, the electricity here worked only from sunset to sunrise.  The thick heat and fan required the only outlet in our plywood, thatched roof shack so our phones and laptops were left uncharged. 

The hillsides rising like a medieval wall over the light yellow crescent shaped beach were covered in green palms and leafy trees that would have made a nice hike for anyone so inclined, but that seemed too much like work on an island where umbrellas both shaded patches of sand and decorated the sweet milkshakes that beckoned to you to just chill out.  The shade was a necessity because to brave even 15 minutes lying in the sun was to sweat from every pore in your body, mine rolling off the tip of my nose splattering onto the pages book I was reading.  The cool water was a necessary refresher after one of nature’s saunas.  You could easily see the grains of sand on the bottom through the clear turquoise water even 60 meters into the bay where at high tide I could still stand in between rolling waves.  The surface of the water was like pulled taffy that sunlight shimmered through adding little streaks of almost neon green along angular lines where the waves broke. 

It would almost be too easy to get lost here, lying on the beach forgetting the outside world, drowning any sorrows or regrets in a Snickers milkshake and reading the second hand books readily available.  There are stories of backpackers coming for a few days and staying for weeks, some even finding work under the table and staying for years.  My trio only added an extra day to our stay despite the temptation.  We relaxed on the beach, ate out every night and generally enjoyed ourselves in our own little island paradise, both on land and underwater.