Welcome to My Paradise
Simon Picture Welcome to My Paradise is a song by Steven and the Coconut Trees, a Reggae band from Java. It also describes the time I had on Gili Trawangan. After a 5+ hour boat ride from hell bobbing up and down in the choppy sea between Bali and Lombok where people were puking over and onboard, I have arrived in my most recent paradise, Gili Trawangan. We arrived just after dark and needed to find a place to stay.
I just wanted to find a nice quite place where I could chill when I wanted to and not too far from the parties when I wanted to party. I decided to be a nice guy and offered to help a girl that had a particularly difficult time on the boat (think onboard) find a place 2 crash and maybe share a place. We ended up a little ways from the jetty at a nice place called Sagita Homestay. She was feeling a bit rough so I gave her the nice room with a sitter toilet vs the squatter that I got and we’d share a room the next night. We ended up staying there for 2 weeks. This is the type of island that Jimmy Buffett would write songs about. In fact, I think he already did because the weather was certainly here, The skies are too clear, life’s so easy today, The beer is too cold, the daiquiri’s too fruitful, There’s no place like home when it’s this far away. Anyway, I digress. The island was so chill and the people so friendly, it took me 6 days just to bother figuring out how to get off the island. I had a goal of 1 activity a day. It could either be snorkeling, walking around the island, biking around the island, walking over the hill, playing volleyball, or even playing chess with the locals. I made that goal on most days.
A typical day on Gili T would start off with waking up around when I woke up. Sitting out on my porch and listening to my MP3 player thru my speakers while having breakfast for a few hours chatting with Sandy Onboard(remember my disclaimer) or reading a book. Then lunch at a local (not more than 100 meters away) restaurant. After the hottest part of the day, I’d venture out to the beach and go ’swimming’ or lay out in the shade and do some more reading. Somehow or another it would get towards dark and time to shower up for the evening movie and drinks until the weeeee hours of the next morning. This one ‘restaurant’/movie theater showed 2 movies a night with the best “Engrish” subtitles. I’m not sure why, but they invariably had Engrish subtitles for movies in English. They must have hired a non-english speaking person to do the subtitles because every time he didn’t know a word, he used ’soyabean cakes’ instead and evil became ‘the dickens’. So, “that evil perpetrator” would be subtitled as “The dickens soyabean cake”. In fact, the subtitles were the only reason that made watching the remake of The Omen bareable.
Rudy’s Pub Picture After the movie we would invariably work our way down to Rudy’s Pub where Jacko the friendliest bartender in the world would say Welcome Ray, welcome Sandy and put a large Bingtang beer in front of us with 2 chilled glasses. And for some reason, Jacko always made sure it was happy hour prices for me all day. I even helped out behind the bar sometimes. And thus the cycle repeated…
I had heard that there were no ATMs, no banks, and only extortionists mascarading as moneychangers on this island, but the ATM in Padangbai didn’t accept my card and the dive shops wouldn’t give me a cash advance on my Visa. I showed up on the island with a mere million Rupiah. Now that might sound like a lot of money (except for the mere bit), but it’s really only about $100 USD. Fortunately for me, and part of why I love this island so much is that I only spent an average of $15 a day here. That’s including my $4 room with attached bath and breakfast included (emmm….. baaaanaanaaahh pancakes), eating, drinking and any entertainment I might have chosen ie.. snorkeling, movies. Unfortunately, 100/15 = < 7 days on my favorite island. Fortunately I found Simon, a diver that could use his credit card to pay for his dives and happened to have a huge surplus of cash I could buy which held me over for another week in the land of turquoise waters and beautiful sunsets. Sunset Hammock Sunset
Tags: Indonesia
Kane
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