We set off from our hotel in Bali at 6am and made our way to Padang Bai, a town in Easten Bali where the ferries to Lombok leave from. We waited an hour and hopped on to our boat, which was like a massive speed boat, one of the many leaving at the same time. The sea was flat and so we arrived in Sengigi at around 1pm. They started unloading the luggage, one after the other: big backpacks, small backpacks, blue backpacks, black backpacks, Marc’s backpack, but sure enough, not Vanessa’s backpack. Apparently, the crew informed me, my luggage must have been sent to the wrong island. After some phonecalls, they assured me that my luggage would be dropped off in Sengigi later that afternoon.
So I waited at the jetty with Marc’s backpack while he went in search of a hostel. I was in a bad mood because of my backpack issue and I was also a little wary because we had heard from many about the crime prevalent in Lombok. And there I was sitting at the jetty with all of Marc’s belongings including all his camera equipment. To make me even more wary, a group of perhaps 10 or more young local boys, all under the age of 14, were lingering around. When a young boy approached me with a group of boys behind him, asking if he can speak to me, I rudely said “No”, turned my face, clutched my bag closer to me and put my feet up on Marc’s camera bag. Certain that they were planning to rob the tourists in the area, I watched them as they went up to tourists asking to chat to them, expecting to see a crime right before my eyes. When nothing interesting happened, I started to wonder if I was being paranoid. Sure enough, a few minutes I heard a local man, with a T shirt of a language school, telling a tourist that these boys are his students and he brought them here to practise speaking English with foreigners. Haha, paranoid much?
Anyway, Marc returned, we checked into our guesthouse and went back to the jetty to wait for my backpack, which returned later in the afternoon, fully intact. The next day we ended up randomly hiring a driver with two Dutch girls- Rachel and Sanne- whom we had met at the guesthouse. We went round the hotspots of Lombok: a local village called Sasak (that we felt had become more of tourist attraction than a local authentic village), an even more commercialised weaving factory and a seasside village called Kuta. Kuta turned out to be the highlight of the day, the long stretch of white sand and beautiful beaches mixed with the rustic, surfing atmosphere was fantastic. While Marc was crossing the road he came face to face with a guy who he thought looked familiar and randomly started chatting to him. When the guy removed his sunglasses, Marc realised that he was chatting to one of the French guys we had met at Coconut Bar, on Koh Bulon (Thailand!!), three months earlier! What an unvelieably small world we live in. Anyway, we started chatting and the guy, Jeremy, convinced us to follow him to a more secluded but nicer beach a 10 minute drive away. So we followed them on their bikes, after convincing our very reluctant driver to take us there. The beach turned out to be in low tide so the reef was sticking out in many places, nonetheless is really was a beautiful beach. We chilled there with Jeremy and some of his friends before he decided he wanted to show us something cool. It turned out that this something cool was located in a dodgy area where people were known to get mugged and stabbed, so it took a lot of convincing to get the driver to take us there. We eventually stopped on a hill and asked a local man if we could pass through his land to get to a cave behind his bamboo house. Jeremey said the surprise will happen at exactly 5.50pm and sure enough, at 5.52pm, thousands and thousands of bats flew out of the cave above our heads and start swarming around and flying out to find their dinner for the night. The show lasted a few minutes and we hurried back into our taxi as we were a bit concerned that he would leave without us. The ride back was quick and uneventful as the driver was pretty pissed off at us for dragging his day on until 7pm.
Anyway, the 4 of us had dinner at the hostel together and we told Rachel and Sanne about our plans to either climb Mount Rinjani or to go straight to Flores from there. They decided to join us on our travels, and to make the decision easier Rachel and Marc played rock, paper, scissors to decide our fate. Turned out Rachel won and so the next day we set off at 2pm for a 28 hours journey to Flores. We only made it as far as the bus station, a 20 minute Bemo ride out of Sengigi, and had to turn back, as we had been given the wrong information on the time of departure for the bus and had to wait until the following day. So, back to Sengigi we went, checked into a dorm in a different hostel, enjoyed some sangria and food before heading off to bed and being told off by an American girl in our dorm, to “shut the fuck up”. We did desrve it though as we had been talking and laughing forgetting there was someone else trying to sleep.
The following day we made our second attempt to get to Flores, this time succeeding. I won’t bore you with the details because yes it was a very long and boring journey, but in short, it involved a 3 hour bus ride, a one hour ferry, another 3 hour bus ride, a short stop over for a late dinner, then another 7 hour bus ride, a 2 hour bemo ride and finally an 8 hour ferry which arrived in Labuan Bajo at 5pm the following day.
-Vanessa-
Marc and Van Explore 