At the airport in Bali, we look for a taxi to take us to our hotel in Denpasar. We are talking to a taxi driver but he charges quite a high price. He blames this to the fact that gasoline prices have risen. We know that gasoline prices are fixed in Indonesia by government subsidies. So we do not believe him and continue to negotiate the price. Afterwards we’ll see that the gasoline price indeed has risen, about 0.60 euros per litre (before 0.40 euros).

Denpasar Airport

We stay three days in Denpasar to do some laundry, to work a bit on our blog and to plan what we will do before going to Australia. We decide to rent a scooter to drive to Lombok, but first we want to spend a few days in Lovina, our favourite place in Bali. Arrived in Lovina, we return to our previous hotel. We are now clearly in the rainy season because it rains every day, but it is still warm enough to take a dip in the hotel pool. We look for a store that can make new flag stickers for us as we removed all the old ones to pass the quarantine inspections in Australia. We easily find a store and they do a good job.
When we leave Lovina, we again take a different road to the pier, and we are treated with some nice views again. A few kilometres before reaching the pier we notice that we have a flat tire and drive to a Honda dealer to replace it.

Fixing the Puncture

With some delay we reach Padangbai and we can drive straight onto the ferry to Lombok. Just as last time, the sea is pretty rough and the boat swings back and forth. After four hours we reach Lombok but for some reason the boat docks backwards. It takes time to unload the boat because there are many trucks on it and they can’t manoeuvre backwards easily in the narrow boat. After about an hour we are able to drive off. It's already dark and it’s quite late when we check into our hotel near Senggigi. We're going to bed almost straight away so we can leave tomorrow on time to Gili Trawangan. We’ve already been here over a month ago, but we have enjoyed it so much that we want to go back again once more.
We do some shopping on Lombok because everything is more expensive on Gili. After that we drive to Bangsal where we can take the boat to Gili. Lombok looks much greener than the last time we were here because of the rain. Along the way we take pictures of the beautiful bays we pass because the last time we were here, we drove in the dark.

Views over a Bay in Lombok

In Bangsal we look for a parking for our scooter (remember that there is no motorized traffic allowed on the Gili Islands). Around noon we arrive at our cheap beachfront bungalow and we immediately are accompanied by a nice cat, which we call Balimoon. She’s very skinny so we decide to buy some food for her. There’s no cat food to be found on the island, but we do find dog food even though we have never seen a dog here. She doesn’t seem to mind…

Balimoon

After dinner Balimoon enjoys a nap on the single bed in our bungalow. By evening she goes out, but when we come back from dinner, there she is ... and she even brought us a present: she caught a mouse and took it home to show us.
The next day we walk to the centre of the island to have lunch. From the restaurant we have a nice view over Gili Meno and we think it would be nice to swim across. We see on our map that it’s about a one kilometre swim. If the weather is nice tomorrow, we’ll undertake the trip. The rest of the day we enjoy the view from our bungalow.

Lombok

Goats and Cats in and around our Bungalow

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