Day 10 (14/1/12)

V - Our time in Gili Trawangan was finally on end and we had another day of travel to look forward to. I was actually looking forward to it as our first ferry trip had proved to be a lot of fun and if this one was even half as good, we could quite easily call it a day well spent.

We woke up early in the morning and rushed down to the harbor. As is typical of anything we are early for, there was inevitably a delay on the other side and we ended up waiting for the boat to arrive. After several false alarms, we finally caught the right boat and were on our way back to Lombok. Unlike our arrival on Gili, our departure was amid clear blue skies and perfect calm waters. And so we arrived at our destination that much quicker.

Our journey was one of several stages and at the first pitstop, in Bangsal, we had breakfast and chatted with some friendly travelers. Sruti akka chose a random old couple to talk to as is her habit and I struck up a conversation with a nice young Canadian diver. V out.

S - The old couple that Vishu referred to were from Germany and had just arrived from their trip to India. Surprisingly, unlike other Germans I had met so far, they actually knew where Murnau was and so things about daddy came up. It was a friendly exchange of my limited impressions of Germany and their limited impressions of India. The words, “beautiful, peaceful and well organized” kept coming to mind! ;)

We were then driven to Lembar, the second stage of our journey to Bali which was just a normal drive. The third stage was the ferry from Lembar to Padang Bai in Bali. Unlike our earlier ferry ride, this one wasn’t as much fun! It didn’t have great deck chairs or a lovely Indo-Brit family to talk to. So Vishu and I had to keep ourselves entertained. We started to get silly and giggle a lot and cooked up strange and weird stories about ourselves and laughed our heads off! We had actually planned to go through the Lonely Planet to look for our accommodation for that night and the following couple of nights. But we were in a weird silly mood and didn’t feel like being very responsible. But daddy in his infinite kindness, arranged it for us. You see, I was too lazy to turn a few pages in the guide book, so I turned to the stranger sitting next to me and asked her (Meg) where she was planning to stay in Bali. She told us that she had been staying at a lovely place in the center of Ubud on her earlier visit and was going to try and see if there were any rooms available now. She was happy to take us to the place she was going to and we decided to simply tag along. By the way, Meg leads an interesting life. She works in Canada for the rights of the native people in mines and will soon be working in South Africa with AIDS patients!

V - I had planned to use the ferry ride to catch up on some much needed sleep and my decision seemed justified pretty quickly as the ferry filled up with a rather large number of people who all had similar ideas and proceeded to “reserve” all the available seats. I had picked out a nice comfortable lounge chair with a rather delightful backrest, but my dearest sister, in her infinite wisdom suggested we sit somewhere else. This seat she had chosen is best described as a rather large box. That’s it. Nothing more to it. And we were pretty much stuck on the bloody box for the rest of the journey as all the other seats (including the one I’d chosen earlier) were quickly occupied. Bye bye sleep, I guess.

S - The reason I had chosen the lovely, clean and broad bench to sit on, instead of the dirty backrest chair that Vishu had chosen, was because it was the only seat with any kind of view of the ocean! The brilliant view from the backrest chairs was that of the half-rotten, moth infested wall of the boat that stood about 10" from ones chair! But after a while, one of the dirty chairs were soon vacant and Vishu moved there to get some sleep while I sat on the box thingi and watched on as the ocean passed by. The waves soon turned a little wild and people standing at the railing had to duck every now and then to escape the spray of cool salty water. I got sprayed a couple of times myself. It was great!

When the ferry ride ended, we went together with Meg to the place she had suggested. It turned out that we got rooms there and she didn’t! Poor thing, she had to go find another place. Our homestay was one of the best accommodations on our trip so far. The homestay had intricate carvings and it had a look that was between a temple and a palace. It was surrounded by beautiful gardens, a lovely pool, clean rooms and beautiful sitouts. After our crappy room at Gili T, we were in accommodation paradise!! :)

Things we did on the ferry,

1. Missed Telugu comedy scenes and cursed ourselves for not bringing any Telugu movies with us! Looks like spices aren’t the only essentials for us while on the road.

2. We missed homemade food so much that we ended up making a list of all the top delicious dishes we wanted to eat once we were back home. So Amma, Sailu aunty and Yvu aunty, here comes the menu for the week of arrival!

- Dosa and fish pulusu (Nellore style)

- Sailu Aunty’s Chicken Biryani

- Hot rice with Gongura and Avakaya with hot ghee and finely chopped onions

- Uppu merapakayalu

- Nellore Karam Dosa

- Biryani from Cosmo Club

- Homemade Rasam

- Spicy Chicken Soup from Cascade

- Packet of Corn Puff

- Chicken Frankie