Gili Air
Fantastic – we’ve got to Gili Air and have woken up in our pretty cool hostel, in our own little wooden shack on stilts. This hostel was called Begadang, a decent walk from the main centre of town, but fairly new so still very much so in good nick. We began the day with the walk back into town and stopped by a super cute little café called Gili Bliss for 2 DELISH smoothies – note: you’ll see a running theme of mine throughout this trip is that the only smoothie I order is a choc/peanut butter/banana. We then walked all round through some of the shops and along the beach front before heading back to Gili Cooking Classes for a lesson over lunch. At around £20 is wasn’t necessarily as cheap as the rest of the fare in Indonesia but definitely worth it. We made 4 things, all (obviously) traditional Indonesian, which was so great to see how simple it was mainly. Included was making peanut butter for the satay sauce by hand – a sweat was most definitely worked up!
We left absolutely stuffed so more walking was required. The weather then unfortunately took a turn for the worst just after we had purchased sunbeds to lay on for the afternoon. The sun brollies were conversely needed for rain shelter which is not what we had paid for!
That evening after getting ready and heading for the famous sunset at one of the beach front bars around the corner from the hostel we moseyed over to one of the restaurants that was screening Eat, Pray, Love outside. This was an opportunity that I couldn’t pass up since I was just finishing the book and we were indeed IN BALI!
The next day was more of what we were wanting, sun. We did some bathing and hired snorkels to see apparently the best snorkelling in Bali – not sure I would agree with that though. We cycled around, myself only just since I was about as rusty at it as the bike I was riding. We rushed off for sundowners again then to dinner at the islands famous Mexican restaurant, which was fab u lous.
It was a quest of Charlie’s to go ‘subwinging’ since the moment we got on the plane to Bali, so we found out all the info and booked ourselves on a boat along with a Scandi family. I decided to sit this one out on the basis that my lung capacity is not much greater than an asthmatic’s, so I was moral support on the boat. The idea of subwinging is that you hold on to a board attached to the back of the boat and in tilting each side of the rotatable board you can direct yourself up and down underwater, eventually leading to doing tricks. After a few successful hours on the boat we got back to the hostel packed up and went to a really funky little place called Patchamama, a super healthy café in the centre of the island. We had the most delicious meal, but maybe avoid the summer rolls, since us as summer roll connoisseurs where somewhat underwhelmed. We were then off to Gili Meno via the public ferry to our new hostel, the Rabbit Tree .