Gili Air
West of Lombok is a string of three tiny islands, each maybe a kilometer and a half long. Gili Air is the easternmost one, and the scene is balanced between Gili Trawangan, where ravers pop party pills all night, and Gili Meno, where you are better advised to pop malaria pills because the central lake breeds mosquitos. Air suited us just fine, with neither mosquitos nor techno to keep us from our sleep.
No motor vehicles are allowed on any of the three Gilis, so horse cart or bicycle are the only alternatives to hoofing it yourself. Fortunately we enjoy walking, so even though we arrived rather late, we trekked along the beach to find our hotel. Restaurants along the way provided oases of light to see by. They line the beach, providing individual bamboo platforms with cushions and low tables that ooze ambience. The views, across the water to the volcanic hills of Lombok, aren’t bad either.
We planned to motivate bright and early the next morning to get to the dive center, since our primary plan here was to dive. The easy pace of the island had already got to us though, and despite rising early we were seduced by a lazy breakfast into missing the first dive. The second dive of the day was cancelled because today is Friday and the mostly Muslim staff was in temple. So it was afternoon before we arrived on Hans Reef.
Right away we realized how spoiled learning at Bunaken made us. The bottom was not completely covered in coral, there were not solid walls of fish, and the visibility was not effectively infinite. Still, there was a good deal of coral in several large outcroppings, called bombies. And it was our first dive since being certified, excitement enough in itself. We saw a bunch of neat stuff, including a foot long sea cucumber that looked like something out of Dune.
Our next dive, the following morning, was a training dive, the “Peak Performance Bouyancy” course. In diving, a number of things affect your bouyancy: body fat, wetsuit, weights, and tank. You add air to your buoyancy control device to balance things out so you have neutral bouyancy, but each time you fill and empty your lungs your bouyancy increases and decreases. Breath control allows you to use these changes to move around easily in the water, or prevent them from moving you when you don’t want them to. This is especially important when you want to get close to a reef or a delicate organism without disturbing it. You can use your breath to lower yourself gently in like an elevator, and then back out again without using your fins.
So we learned and we practiced skills. First was swimming through a one-meter square frame without touching, then swimming through upside down without touching. These were both made difficult by the bulky tank on each of our backs, a protuberance we have not yet internalized. Next we had to swim over top a snorkel planted in the sand, then pivot up and snatch it with our knees. The final test was to hover unmoving in the water while we passed a one-kilo weight back and forth. This is tricky because it requires anticipating the weight with a big inward breath in order not to sink immediately. It also requires holding an extra pocket of air in the lungs while otherwise breathing normally.
After learning these new skills, we started off on a fun dive, then another at two o’clock. The second dive was further away, at Shark Point. The site was disappointingly crowded with trash at the surface, and down below there was low visibility and a strong current. We had to swim extremely hard just to stay in one place, something generally inadvisable as it exhausts tank air faster. But the rest of our group found an interesting bombie, and we were obliged to wait, regulators and masks shaking as if in a strong wind. Swimming back far enough to actually see anything was beyond our strength.
It was halfway through this disappointing dive that I made what was, for me, the sighting of the trip: a cuttlefish! These squidlike creatures have fascinated me for years. They are said to be as intelligent as octopodes, and have skin that can change color and texture very rapidly and dramatically. Normally they use this to match their surroundings, but some scientists think they may communicate with each other this way also. I was the first to spot this one, and was both proud and jealous when the other divers crowded around to see. Amazingly the creature did not squirt ink and disappear, but hovered effortlessly and precisely in place, staring back at us and flicking from mottled grey to brown to dark red to mottled green and so on. Cuttlefish can also change their skin texture between spiky and smooth, an ability our new friend was also proudly displaying.
I could have stayed and watched for the rest of the dive, but someone spotted a turtle, and we swam off to see it. Beyond it was another turtle, and another. All had beautiful patterned shells, but none of them changed colors.
The food on Gili Air was surprisingly very good, despite the small size of the place. There was a wide selection of restaurants serving food from all around the world. As much as I enjoy eating local food, there are approximately four traditional indonesian dishes accesible to me as a vegetarian: nasi goreng, mie goreng, nasi tempe / tahu, and gado-gado. I was a little sick of this and treated myself to pizza, a strangely ubiquitous dish on this island. After a series of disappointing experiences in New Zealand, I swore off pizza, but here they baked it in a brick oven until the dough was crispy as the cheese browned beautifully on top. It was much better pizza than I had any reason to expect.
I could easily have stayed on this island much longer, relaxing and diving and snorkelling and eating good food. But we have only six days left in Indonesia, and we promised ourselves we’d see more of Bali. More importantly, our friend Tracy from San Francisco will be meeting us in Ubud. So once more we boarded the lovely Perama ferry, a wooden pinisi with two decks and a little faux beach in back for sunbathing. I’m writing now from the deck of that boat, watching Mt. Agung in Bali approach off our starboard bow.