Off to Lombok
Off to a new location today, so up at the crack of 8 for some breakfast, and then we’re off. Now I wouldn’t exactly saw that 8 is an unusual time to start the day, particularly for my trusty sidekick, but this morning, even that time came early. About 2 in the morning, we awoke to some load cracking noises. Figuring something had found its way into our room, we switched on the lights to find the offender, only to find a completely empty room.
No sooner had I switched off the lights and secured myself back under the covers, than we heard the same noise again. Back out of bed, lights back on, but still no guilty looking monkey peering back from the corner to explain the commotion.
One more time we hear the noise, but having left a light on, are able to look up in time so see a tile peeling away from the pillar next to the bed and crashing down about two feet from Ang’s head. Falling asleep proved a little difficult after that, and by the time the adrenalin cleared the system, a good couple hours of prime sleeping time had passed.
Nevertheless, we already have reservations at the next hotel, so groggy or not, we’re committed to moving on. After calling around a bit to consider the options, we find our choices limited to a local ferry (5-8 hours to cross on a sketchy boat) or a 25 minute flight (probably on a sketchy plane, so that part may be a wash). Suffice to say we were quickly on the road to the airport, about an hour and a half away.
The flight itself turned out to be be relatively painless. The only real negative was that deoderant isn’t common amongst the locals, so when you cram 80 of them into a long metal tube and apply heat, it provides a bot of a wake up call for the senses. Fortunately, we had barely left the ground when the announcement came that we were landing in Lombok.
Now for those not familiar (as we certainly weren’t before we planned this trip), Lombok is a sister island to Bali, although far less known, and subsequently less travelled. Before the bombings in Bali, Lombok was starting to come into its own, positioned as being like Bali before the tourists took over. And while very small parts of the island have recovered (the Gili Islands, which are just offshore, for example), the main island never has, and the impact has been severe. Based on the number of dark windows at the hotel, I’d be surprised in occupancy was over 40%, despite being on par with anything in Bali and significantly less expensive.
As we arrived fairly late in the day (around 5 o’clock), we didn’t get to see much of what lies beyond the hotel. We did walk down the beach and watched the sunset, but not before the beach merchants sniffed us out for the fresh meat that we were and descended like a horde of locusts, leaving us with a handful of overpriced souvenirs, and a smaller wallet.
The constantly evolving plan is to stay here three nights and then head for Hanoi Tuesday. The next window for that flight is Thursday, which seemed to leave the time in Vietnam a little short. We’re pretty relaxed already here though, so inertia might just keep us here the extra two days.