My Gili Island Adventure

Ever since I got back from Bali, everyone keeps asking me how my trip was. I had a blast there, (check this post to read all about it) but to be honest, I think Bali quite overrated or maybe I expected too much. A friend of mine who's been living there for five years suggested me to check out the Gili Islands which are three idyllic atolls with powdery white sand, clear sparkling turquoise water and spectacular views of Bali’s volcano Mt. Agung. The islands are known as Gili Trawangan, Gili Meno and Gili Air. To get to the closest island Gili Trawangan, we took a flight from Bali to another island called Lombok. We had to take a two hour drive from the Lombok airport to a harbor and then it was a twenty minute speed boat ride to reach our destination. 

That's me all excited aboard the speedboat! Felt like I was in a movie!

Gili T is the ‘Party Island’ with numerous restaurants and bars along the main strip and the beach and there's a party everywhere. It reminded me of Kuta but was a lot better as all the places were by the beach and definitely had less of trashy crowd.  Gili Meno is the quietest of the three and attracts a lot of honeymooners while Gili Air is a balance of the two so we stayed in Gili T for one day, skipped Meno and moved to Air after that.

Harbor selfie

The best places for snorkeling and swimming on all three islands are along the main beach areas.  You can see all types of marine life just by snorkeling including many fishes and corals and lots of turtles.

Disha lost a slipper while clicking pictures in the ocean but to her good luck, found one lying exactly there for the same foot in her size so here's what she wore for the next few days - 

That's not all. Her real slipper (the pink one) broke and once again, magically appeared a slipper on the sand for the same foot which fit her perfectly so she basically returned home with two random slippers instead of her own.

As you can see, the view is absolutely stunning and the beaches are breathtakingly beautiful with the various shades of blue in the sky, water and mountains in the background.

Just look at how beautiful the water in Gili Air is! In front is the third island, Gili Meno.

All three Gili Islands don't permit motorized transport so you need to walk, use bicycles or travel by horse carriages. There are a lot of cats on the islands, but I was very surprised to see a lot of them had really tiny tails and some even had bunny tails. Sadly, I couldn't take any pics thanks to no camera or phone.  Once I got back, I tried to research why Indonesian cats have no tails and found theories like people cut them off to depict that they are neutered, or they lose them in cat fights and downright hilarious ones like monster rats prey on stray kittens, preferring the tail as a delicacy. In the end, turns out the truth is that its a genetic defect caused by inbreeding.

We met a lot of lovely people and absolutely loved the vibe at Gili Air and are definitely going back there. Our original plan was to head back to Bali and spend a last day there but we loved Gili Air so much that we decided to skip our flight to Bali and stayed back. We thought we could go directly to the Bali airport from there to take our flight back to India but little did we know that there were no boats that leave from the island to Bali early in the morning and we HAD TO reach the Bali airport at 11am. When we finally realized the gravity of the situation, we had one helluva adventurous long journey that left us traveling halfway across Indonesia just to catch our plane. We left the island around 7pm and had to take a fifteen minute speedboat to Lombok and drive for two hours to Lembar, a harbor that has a painfully slow 5 hour long public ferry to Padang Bai in Bali. I also discovered that I have awful sea sickness so the feeling of nausea killed me and I couldn't get any sleep during that five hour boat ride. When we finally got there, it was almost 3 am and we had another hour and a half long drive to the airport.

We were famished, tired and sleep deprived and picked up this green bread from a supermarket which kept us alive for a long time!

Green bread = RESPECT

We finally reached the airport at 5am and were relieved that we finally made it and wouldn't be missing our flight back home. 

Here's me eating Dragon Fruit for the first time in my life!! Its so pretty!!

However, the sad part was that my strange prayer in my previous post had worked and thanks to the volcano, our flight was delayed till 6pm. To my dismay, the airline was totally mismanaged and did not tell us that it was cancelled till 11pm so they wasted the whole extra day we got in the Bali airport. One of their staff also misbehaved with a lot of people on our plane so please DO NOT EVER travel by Malindo Airlines. Terrible service and an awful experience. So ultimately, after traveling across what felt like half of Indonesia, we got to the airport at 5am and were there till 11pm next night. 

When I saw this instagram booth at the airport, you can see my fake smile and just how much fun I was NOT having at the airport. 

Note to self - In future, carry an extra $200 so that if you're stranded in an airport, you can drown your sorrows at a bar or kill it with the shopping. 

Oh and the airline took our luggage away but made us spend the night in Bali so I had to wear the same outfit for the second night in a row and spend a third night wearing it flying back to India. So much for being a fashion blogger. They put us on a morning flight to Kuala Lumpur and made us wait for another 6 hours for our flight to Mumbai. Here I am when we were finally leaving from Kuala Lumpur to Mumbai and I was so happy to be going back home because I was dying to shower and get some sleep. 

So that was the second leg of my trip at the stunning Gili islands and the misadventures we had! Hope you enjoyed reading!