Gili Air and Lombok

Gili Air

The World Arc boats were gathering in Lombok for their onward journey towards South Africa. So. with limited room in the anchorages and no mooring balls free at Medana Bay marina, we decided to head over to one of the islands opposite Lombok, Gili Air. It is one of three Gili islands, the others being Gili Trawangan and Gili Meno.

One of the charms of Gili Air is that no motorised transport is allowed on the island. The donkey work of moving goods around the island to the various hotels, bars and restaurants is indeed done by donkeys.

Getting here was a bit of a challenge, though, as the wind picked up to 30 knots as we arrived. It’s not good when you are trying to pick up a mooring ball. But we managed to grab it half an hour later after one lost boat hook and a few close calls.

The trauma was worth it. It was nice to be in a place with a great selection of restaurants. By the time we got here, we were feeling a little noodled out. To add to the culinary variety, Maria enrolled in a cooking school at Gili Air with an international crowd of students from France, the Netherlands and the UK. I got the best part of the deal, I think, I just ate the food.

Lombok

On the day that the World ARC boats left for cooler places, we left Gili Air and were able to choose from a selection of newly vacated mooring balls.

In addition to moorings, they have a haul-out facility and boat yard. And in the boatyard, we came across Hullabaloo of Normandy. We first came across Hullabaloo in Morocco back in 2017 when Craig and Julie owned her. It’s a small world for boats.

Close to Medana Bay is the Lombok Wildlife Park. We bought the full experience ticket that included interaction with the elephants, getting close to the orangutans, a guide and lunch at the restaurant.

Our guide stopped our fellow zoo visitor, Bill, in his tracks when he tried to approach this elephant. He might look cute, but after years of being in the circus, he wants revenge on people. His new and non-circus trick is to wrap his trunk around you and smash your head into the floor. It’s true – they have a very long memory.

And that was our day at the wildlife park.

Lombok Marina put together a great event for us, supplying local food and playing local instruments, but unfortunately, I had a camera problem – I forgot to get it out.

The marina (it’s actually just mooring balls with the exception of a shallow draft pontoon) is a great place to refuel, get laundry done and just hang around. There’s a restaurant here, and if you need boat work or just your boat cleaning, you can get that done, too. They also helped us to navigate some of the changing bureaucracy that meant we needed a Green Book / Sanitation Certificate. They worked with the authorities to get that for us within a day for IDR 500k.

We are Bali-bound next.