When You Really Want To Get Away

TRY INDONESIA'S LOMBOK and its GILI Islands on its east coast. Oh, go to Lombok only on the Hydro Foil, or you are flirting with ferry capsizing and death! Once there, rent a taxi to the other side. Cheap. You go up over the volcano which is the entire island, and come down on the far side in sight of Eden, or whatever the hell you call Paradise. Take the first boat which isn’t leaking and has life vests. It’s less than a mile if you’re a good swimmer. Let them take your clothes.

Rent a cabana. If you go to your left when you land you can get chicken, fish and various sea food. If you got right, fish only. Left is good. Nice cabins, netted, breakfast served in bed as part of the cost... which is almost nothing. 6.00 US for two. Oh, I forgot. There are no gasoline powered anything here. You walk, take a bike, or donkey cart. We liked the last. It’s a quarter a person from one end to the other. Don’t bargain! Now for the best part.

Hire a cart that serves fresh pineapple. Also two bits each. Stop at the swim shack and rent goggles and snorkel, no need for fins and take the two kilometer ride out to the beginning of the reef. It’s about forty yards off shore, and the water is only neck deep. But there is a nice three mile an hour current carrying you back to where you set off. On with the goggles, swim out, get your mask adjusted and begin one of the most awesome drifts on the planet. And you don’t have to take a single stroke or kick. The current carries you all the way.

The reef is a fish hotel. Yellow, red, blue, all combinations of those colors, and add some really weird looking shapes. Size? There’s gropers out there that are five feet long and go about fifty pounds. And octopus, crabs of various sizes and . . . and, and, and, and, and! And coral formations which make you think you’re in OZ not back in a cubicle!

When you get back to the main beach, you crawl out, go to the ladies selling pineapples, mangos, bananas and other fruit that looks good , tastes good, but you can’t remember how to pronounce. Get a glass of juice, slurp down a pineapple, get out another half a buck and take the ride back up and do it all over again! And as the day progresses, the species changes! Bigger fish when the tide comes in, and smaller when it goes out. But the tide does not run in the reef area. Don’t ask me why. This is paradise! Things have a way of being perfect.

So you’re exhausted because all you do back here is watch day time TV or bar hop. Have lunch! Or dinner. Or what ever you want to call it. NOSH! Try the nine or ten kinds of fish. The spicy chicken is YUMMMM! And all of the veggies are fresh, right out of the garden so you may have some difficulty recognizing the real taste of a tomato or squash . . . . sorry. I shouldn’t blast away like this, but writing about it makes me want to get outta here now! Another almost forgotten fact. The closer you are to Auz, the better this nation is. Flores is also a great place, and if you can keep off of Kuta Beach, Bali is also cool. Lots of stuff to do on both. For us Kuta Beach was avoiding Aussie pub crawls and a scorpion in Marilyn's hat...which was lying on the other bed in our room. She saw the creature before she put the hat on thank goodness. In any case, get out of Kuta and Bali can be quite nice.

Maybe I should write a travel book for wild and crazy kinds of people. Get out there! Not on a tour or some eat twenty-four hours day oceangoing polluter, go on your own. Take a chance. Go up to Sulawesi and get into a week long funeral. That’s where I’m taking you later, sports fans.