Just over the hotel wall, things looked a lot more paradisical. There was a grassy meadow with scattered palm trees and a few grazing cows, sloping down to an white sand beach that was empty except for a friendly fisherman and a laughing toddler who ran around after him.
The hotel was isolated, and I felt a bit trapped. I took a cab over to Senggigi, Lombok's tourist town, a dozy strip of tour operators, dive shops, restaurants, and badly-lit general stores. The general stores cater to tourists: Cookies, beer, water, antidiarrheal medicine, wooden masks, cigarettes, and a wide range of antiperspirants. Antiperspirant brands were unfamiliar; I eventually went with Gatsby 'Woody' scent, but could have had Brylcreem 'Optimist' for a little more. The shopkeeper made a serious effort to sell me an English-language newspaper. He claimed it had football, other sports, and news about 'the Korean War'. That shook me, but it turned out I hadn't missed anything important. I think now he was just a geopolitics nerd who only meant that there had never been a formal peace treaty.
Senggigi's nightlife is down Senggigi's one side street. There's a closed 'discotheque and XXecutive karaoke' and a 'billyards sportsfield', where locals were playing pool and laughing. Connecting the main street and the side street was an open plaza of bars and restaurants, most closed, all completely deserted except for a couple of locals sitting on motorbikes.
I arranged to get a lift over to Gili Trawangan with a dive shop. The dive boat was a big outrigger canoe, and it left from a beach; we had to splash out to it and then wade ashore when we arrived. On the drive to the beach, kids were going to school on bicycles; we passed a group of little girls, and two or three of them called out 'hello, good morning'. Outside the school, kids were playing soccer in pink-and-purple school uniforms, twenty or thirty of them chasing one ball around.
There's no motorized transport on Gili Trawangan. The hotel sent a horse-drawn cart to get me. These carts are basically desert-island attempts to build tuktuks out of driftwood, bright paint, car axles, bells, and small, mistreated horses. They bounced more violently than any vehicle I've ever been in. They were all different; one driver had tricked his out with electric lights and a stereo, and he clip-clopped up and down the street at night playing Guns n' Roses.
The hotel welcomed me with the customary juice, wet towel, and tupperware container of pirated DVDs. The operation includes two bungalows. The other one is being renovated; I'm the only guest. Behind them, there's a rectangular lot of packed dirt and half-built fences where more bungalows will probably someday go. In front, there's a small pool; an open-air restaurant; and, across the road, a 'private' stretch of beach where 5 lounge chairs are inexplicably set up every morning by the bewilderingly huge staff.
There's a single road of gravel and packed sand that goes around the island. On my stretch, weirdly rastafied Sasak dudes sit by it trying to sell weed, and shacks advertise magic mushroom shakes; it's a bit like Amsterdam, but with the death penalty for drug trafficking. A handpainted banner stretched across the road near my bungalow advertises a party with a live reggae band on June 24, 2010. It was a 'full moon' party (like the ones in Ko Phi Phi) -- probably a new breakthrough in the community effort to bring together on Gili Trawangan everything that has anything to do with tropical islands and drugs.
Across the road is the beach. Outrigger canoes are beached high up on the sand, some of them rotting away and some being lovingly restored and painted. A kilometer down the road is a collapsing jetty of discoloured concrete; there, the main strip of beach bars and restaurants begins. Every fifty metres on the way over, there's a small thatched shelter. Stationed in each shelter is a shirtless Lombokian guy picking indecisively at a guitar.
Around the other side of the island, there are empty beaches of white sand and bleached coral. Here, isolated homes and hotels have been established by people who fled this way to escape Bob Marley's restless ghost. It's a quiet, mostly reggae-free stretch. You might get slimed by one of the minor Wailers here, but that's it.
At night, the only lights are the ones bars and restaurants have seen fit to put up. For a longish stretch between my bungalow and the main strip, there are no lights at all, and all you can do is head towards the bright pinpoints in the distance and get off to the side when you hear Guns n' Roses.
