Mondays in Gili

I woke up and couldn't find my phone charger. Since my phone has all of our reservations on it, is functioning as our primary camera, and is helping us to stay in touch with Anj for puppy questions, this was disconcerting. I messaged Wayan to ask if he had seen it and then we left the house to check on two shops nearby that sell phone gear. We quickly learned that Google does not sell their products in Indonesia and, in fact, only sells their phones in 8 countries. So we were a little screwed. I was in a funk (despite Steve's reminders that we had redundancies in place for all my phone jobs), but we decided to take advantage of the snorkeling boat trip offered right outside our apartment.

Literally everywhere you walk on Gili Trawangan, there are men attempting to sell you boat trips to go snorkeling. We had been ignoring them (much as you ignore the guys in Central Park selling watches or purses), but the allure of maybe seeing sea turtles and Manta Rays was too big. So for US $10 each, we went on a 4 hour boat trip to sites around the three Gilis.

Very quickly, I began to understand why the trip was so cheap. We were equipped with mask, fins, snorkels, but there were zero safety precautions laid out. We had a driver and a kid who sat on top of the boat spotting for turtles and directing the captain, but there were no directions given the entire day besides "jump, jump!", "in, in!", and "one hour stay here, very romantic" when they dropped us off at a beach side bar on Gili Meno, despite no one knowing that was going to happen. They certainly never instructed folks to be mindful of their fins and not kick the coral, so the reef was in bad shape. There were two upsides to the whole thing. At the second stop on our journey, after telling us to "jump, jump!" we went on a maybe 20 minute snorkel sprint looking for turtles. We saw two! Steve and I, along with one other tourist, kept up with the "divemaster" and didn't realize til later that the reason we didn't see any of our other boat mates was that the driver left the four of us in the water so he could drop someone off who was feeling seasick. So thank goodness we were all keeping up, because there was no boat rescue coming if we had any problems. It was exhausting, but the turtles were amazing. Later when we were dropped at the bar we found out about the woman bring left there to recover during our adventure.

The outing was exhausting. We got back to land around 5pm, went straight to the Airbnb to shower, and accidentally took a 4ish hour nap. We woke up around 9:30pm and got food before heading straight back to bed. It was a long day in the sun, but perfect weather for it!