More Bumpy Rides

Felicity and several market women sit on the boat to Gili T in the throes of sea-sickness...

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Every holiday has to at some point have a snag or two, some niggling little annoyance that stops everything from running like clockwork. For the backpacker, this is inevitable. Without knowing every train timetable, every scam and every tout lurking around the next corner, it is simply impossible to organise your own perfect holiday.

Because I’ve long since given up on using travel agents at all, I’m fairly good at accepting my limitation as an overseas oracle. Occasionally I waste a day here or there, having missed the only bus that leaves at six in the morning or having been turned away at a remote boarder because you can’t make the crossing on a Tuesday. But life goes on, right? For the traveler, there’s always the next day and the next big trip ahead.

Still, it’s hard when you think you’ve finally sussed out a country, only to realise you’re as gullible as the next fool just off the boat. In this case, in terms of getting on the proverbial boat, our journey from Nusa Lembongan to the Gili Islands could not have been more difficult and costly.

I had to snap the camera when I saw how beautiful the sun looked through the old canvas sail of our chartered boat from Lembongan back to Bali...

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Still aching from the raw wounds of my bad luck on boats of late (see previous entry to find out what happened to my beloved laptop), we chartered our own boat from Lembongan to the small fishing village of Kusamba, keeping laptops deep within the recesses of backpacks, as far away from harm’s reach as possible. Once more on dry land in Bali, we were herded into a van, driven north up Bali’s beautiful eastern coastal road and eventually dumped outside a ramshackle tourist office in Padangbai.

Feeling quite proud of ourselves for having arranged this rather tricky journey – one which our guidebook hadn’t indicated was possible – it was this false confidence that was eventually to become our undoing.

When a local Lombokian at Bangsal said that admired my old purple t-shirt so much, I offered it to him. Here it is on its new owner (after I changed into another!)

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‘Quick quick quick quick quick QUICK!’ a young man began barking at us the minute we exited the van. His face appeared desperate and he spoke with the urgency of a pedestrian at a road accident calling for help.

‘The boat to the Gilis is going to leave in two minutes!’ he blurted out, furiously ushering us into the small dingy office and commencing to write out receipts for the tickets we were to purchase at once. Upon handing over a substantial sum, we turned around and discovered through the window that our backpacks were being spirited away by three incredibly eager porters, who were moving at a cracking pace towards a giant boat a hundred metres or so inthe distance.

Running after them, we found ourselves climbing up the cast iron steps of the vessel and onto the deck, before being reunited with our luggage – or so we thought. When we handed over a ten thousand rupea note, the porters all scowled at us in disgust, refusing to accept our crumpled token of appreciation for a service we had nonetheless not requested.

View of Nusa Lembongan as we sailed away...

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‘You give us this? No! You give us ten dollar, now!’

I must admit, often I find it hard to bargain when I’m not sure of the price or when the difference is negligible. Neither was the case here, as we proceeded to argue our way to an agreed price, moving steadily higher and begrudgingly offering more and more notes while our porters refused to budge. It was only when I started yelling that they finally accepted thirty thousand rupea and left us in peace. The tidy little sum we had surrendered was a good two days’ wages for an Indonesian farmer and certainly far too much for five minutes’ work (in fact, I know of very few people anywhere in the world who can make ‘ten dollar’ in five minutes, do you?).

How does one describe one’s anger when, having been brought well and truly to the boil, one discovers that the boat one is on is not going to the place one wants to go (our boat, when it eventually departed not two minutes but three quarters of an hour later, was headed for Lembar in southern Lombok, about 6 hours in additional boat and bus rides from where we needed to be)? What about when the actual price of one’s transport is a tenth of what one has actually paid (the price we were charged plus the porter’s fee was five hundred and thirty thousand rupea – the real cost of two ferry tickets being forty-two thousand)?

I think the rest of this story is best left unsaid.

Needless to say, forced into the additional and unnecessary six hours of boats and busses, we made it to Gili Twarangan in one piece – just. It’s going to take a lot of chilling on this island to cool off from this heated little episode though!