“Come and get shipwrecked,” advertised an island brochure, and that is precisely what it felt like as we followed a group of French, Russian, and Australian tourists off the speedboat after a 2 1/2-hour trip from Bali to this little island in the Indian Ocean.
There are no cars, no motorcycles, no police on the Gili Trawangan. There are, however, dollar Bintang beers, $4 rice dishes, and small gazebos where you can rest 20 feet from the bluest water you ever saw and watch the Lombok volcanoes get painted by the sun.
A dozen pony carts with brightly painted sides waited to take our party - my wife, Wendy, my son Justin, his friend Trevor, and me - to peruse more than a hundred bungalows on the beach beside the Bali Sea. Go left, we had been told, if you want to be in on the island hubbub, the nightly party that runs until dawn at bars along the beach. Go right if you prefer serenity and the sound of the ocean.
We went right. But the island is only 5 miles in circumference, so lodging anywhere is like dropping in on a party that has been going on a long, long time. Local hawkers, accustomed to the arrival of foreigners every morning, shouted for us to come take a look.
We grabbed a place - air conditioning, good shower, comfortable double bed, breakfast, small porch, beach, $25 a night - stowed our gear, and went exploring.
“We are seeing more and more flash backpackers,” Chris Thorpe told us later at a table at Tir Na Nog, the bar he owns with his wife, Miriam, and a couple from Dublin, Becky and Conrad O’Byrne. Tir Na Nog, advertised as the biggest Irish bar on the smallest island in the world, is named after a mythical Irish island where Oisin, a Celtic hero, lived for 300 years in eternal youth with his fairy love. Only when he returned to Ireland and allowed his feet to touch his native soil did he age.
Tir Na Nog, like Gili Trawangan, is a place to feel young.
“A long time ago,” Thorpe said, “we had the sort of hippie backpack crowd you probably know about already. We still have backpackers, but they are young people who have left their first jobs because they are sick of the corporate world. They put the trip on a credit card and worry about it later. We get plenty of Russians, believe it or not. But this is an international island all year long.”
Gili is also a popular dive destination, and we stopped into the Blue Marlin Dive Center to see about rates and instruction. Divers come for the extensive coral reefs, which are inhabited by manta rays, bumphead parrotfish, pipefish, moray eels, turtles, and the occasional black- or white-tipped reef shark. The rarest dive prize is the pygmy seahorse, a creature that lives only in Indonesian waters. Like birders hoping to see a rare eagle or seabird, divers make lists, too, and Gili is a must on many agendas.
We decided against diving, but we grabbed snorkels and fins for $2 each, then hiked northward on the beach so we could drift down with the considerable current that runs between Gili Trawangan and Gili Meno, the second of the three Gili islands that lie to the north of Lombok. As soon as we left the shore zone, the fish darted around us. Large coral heads - some decimated by “fish bombing” techniques employed for years, in which the fishermen use explosives to pulverize the coral to get at the fish - created a natural aquarium. Justin, a little ahead of us, spotted the first turtle, a green one (hawk-billed turtles are also common), and dove to get a closer look. We formed a small pod above the turtle and watched it picking at the coral, its lime head and fins covered with large scales. One by one we nodded at each other. Turtles are a thing to see.
If You Go
How to Get There
Cathay Pacific flies out of large Eastern cities to Hong Kong, about 15 hours. It is another five hours to Jakarta, the capital of Indonesia, and three more to Bali. The boat to the three Gili Islands takes 2 1/2 hours more.
What to Do
You don’t need much beyond a book, old sneakers, and a bathing suit. Many of the restaurants have good rooms for $20-$50 a night. There are Internet connections, phone service, and excellent diving schools.
A number of small shops rent bicycles, an excellent way to see the island. You may also rent a pony cart and take the road around the entire island for about $20. A local stable rents out horses for an evening beach ride.
Visit dive shops (Manta Dive, www.manta-dive.com; Blue Marlin Dive Center, www.bluemarlindive.com; Big Bubble, www.bigbubblediving.com) for snorkels, instruction, dive trips, or sightseeing. Many have pools outside where instruction goes on hourly.
Where to Eat
Gili Trawangan has an excellent variety of restaurants and first-class food. Many restaurants also have movie gazebos, where you can eat, lounge, and watch movies at the same time.
Tir Na Nog: For $125 a night a villa is available with its own pool and chef. Regular (good) rooms $25-$50. Dinner $15-$40.
Beach House: A great beachside terrace. Fine dining. Australian beef and local lobsters. Dinner for two $30.
Horizontal: If dining while reclining is your idea of heaven, this is the place to do it. Dinner for two $30.
We had a late lunch in a beruga, a four-posted gazebo covered with thatch and lined with large pillows. We ordered nasi goreng, a native rice dish that usually includes Chinese greens, meat, or a fried egg. My wife ordered chicken satay, and a woman in native sarong and flip-flops served us 20 feet from the surf. We stayed two hours, moving only enough to keep the sun from grilling us. The meal cost about $20.
At sunset most of the beach community gathered to watch a half dozen cattle being loaded onto a type of long, thin boat preferred by the natives. One by one the cattle got on, destined for Lombok. It took hours and provided the evening’s entertainment.
We finished the night at a bar called Sama Sama (which means “you’re welcome”) drinking frozen margaritas and watching a first-class reggae band. I sat next to a fly fisherman from Britain who was making his way around the world. That afternoon he had been out at the edge of the coral reef, casting for pipefish, when a barracuda swooped in and savaged one of the reef fish.
“It hit so fast, and was gone so quickly, it almost went back in time,” he said. “You wondered if what you had seen could have been possible. And you were left with the memory of it even as it occurred. Strange, but true.”
We went home late, the moon well up. A breeze pushed the palms. Halfway around the world, Boston was sitting down to lunch.
Written by Joseph Monninger
Published on The Boston Globe
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