Island

It was straight onto the beach and into the sea for us then, a lovely blue-green sea with a slight swell, warm and clear. Heavenly!

We colonised a beach gazebo at the optimum distance for the beers to reach us cold from the restaurant's fridge, and there we stayed until after dark, when, our bellies filled with nasi goreng, we returned to our rooms. We'd requested an extra mattress in our room - there being three girls sharing a double bed - but the owner didn't seem willing, so eventually we just asked for an extra room. Occupancy was decided by the traditional Korean method: Rock Paper Scissors, and Leigh won the extra room to herself. The salt-water showers didn't leave us feeling like the cleanest bodies in the world, but we went to bed tired and happy anyway. At about 10pm, Cait and I were woken up by Leigh whispering at our window: she'd just found a scorpion in her bed! We all agreed it was best to just kill it, and for the next ten minutes listened to Leigh's shoe as it thumped the wall in pursuit. Things eventually went quiet, but in the morning, considering the location off the beach and the slightly unclean feel of the place, as well as the deadly insects in the beds, we all decided it was best to leave. We hoisted our packs onto our backs and went off down the beach in search of something cleaner and prettier, and found it in Rawa Indah, a collection of sweet cottages, fronted with airy verandahs and strung with shells and coral. The owner was Austrian, so no concerns about cleanliness!


We'd made plans to snorkel that morning so we headed back down the beach to Gili Meno's Turtle Sanctuary.


Run by Bolong, a wiry, 30-something islander, it's just a collection of rubber pools and old baths shaded by thatch in which turtles of varying ages doze on top of each other. Bolong pays islanders to bring turtle eggs to him instead of eating them; he carefully stores them and, when they hatch, protects the babies until they're about 8 months old, when he releases them into the sea. It's his one-man stand against the rapid decline of hawksbill and green turtles around Lombok. He told us they decimated more than 10kg of fish a day, and with no formal funding, he relies on tourists using his boat, or donating money for a chance to release an adult turtle, so we decided to contribute to the cause and go on a snorkelling trip. It was a tough decision...

Bolong's boat was a traditional one, but with two glass panels in the bottom, which made the trip all the more exciting. Because of his expertise in turtles he took us straight out to a point right on the edge of the reef where we almost immediately saw a green turtle lazily flapping his way through the deep water. As we swam, we were protected to our left by a coral wall; to the right, the waters descended into blue darkness and were a little scary! I saw about five turtles swimming, and another two on the surface after I'd exhausted myself and was sitting on the boat. We also went to a shallow reef, bustling with parrotfish, anemone fish, and unknown bright purple and blue flashes of life.

I could have stayed for the rest of the day, but my stomach was grumbling about having missed breakfast in the hurry of moving and being on time for Bolong, so we returned to the island for lunch.

The next two days we spent in a heady daze of beach lounging, napping on sunloungers, and reading books - especially hard for me, who had an exhausting selection of beautiful new books to choose from, thanks to lovely Liam and Robyn.

We had fresh grilled fish one night, selected from a table of the day's catch, a man lazily fanning the bugs away with a palm leaf.

We ate on a big deck above the sand, the waves gently washing the shore.

Another night we decided to have a cocktail at the only real bar on the island. Our barman started off on good barman terms, but the terms rapidly got awkward. He told us of the dire shortage of women on the island, and that he "wants Western girls, but they're too tall", so at least he "has imagination." "I do this," he says, reaching down below the counter and grinning, sending my mind into overdrive before his hand comes up with a sketch, actually rather good, of a naked woman. Every night, he says, he draws "pretty women", and his masterpiece, an oil painting, brought out from the back of the bar... well, let's just say that up close it looked rather indecent, but from further away, he kept telling us to step back... it looked even more indecent.

Another time we sat on a deck watching lithe children leaping around in the shallows, hitching rides on boats for a short way, laughing uproariously when the boats picked up speed and the slippery poles gently slid the brown arms back into the water.

Slightly further out, fishermen stood with bare torsos and straw hats, working their nets calmly and methodically, sometimes calling out to friends passing by on boats.

It was a time of rest, of calm reflection. At night we lay on our beds and listened to gecko songs - surprisingly loud for such a pale, small thing. During the day we tried our hardest to be true layabouts, but the beaches were shared with islanders carrying treasures for sale - rich cloths and lengths of ikat, turquoise bracelets and pearl necklaces, fabric hammocks and stone boxes, bowls of fresh fruit, which they'd expertly slice up for you there and then.

The Lombok pearls were bewitching; strings of gorgeously imperfect circles, shining white and demure cream, cloudy blue, and the daring, strong black. My first day I got gloriously ripped off by a long-haired man called, rather romantically, Peace. It was okay though - I think of it as a tip for having such an engaging personality. And in international terms, even the most expensive pearls were unbelievably cheap. So cheap that I checked every purchase with fire and bites, leading one man to comment, when Robyn also bit hers, "it's great to sell pearls to people who really know the real from the fake." Mmm. That one had a good selling technique: shameless flattery.

Robyn turned out to be the negotiating superstar - not as weak as Leigh and I, who felt bad going what we thought was too low. She wasn't perfect though: she bought one item for three times the price Leigh later bought it for... oh how we laughed! (No, not really... well, maybe a little...)