Back home now, sorting my photos. Got much better manta videos:… Read the rest

My return to Asia was brief but wonderful, modulo Bali’s traffic on the last day. Covid is just a memory now, Indonesia at least is open and welcoming visitors. I’ll be back! I write this in the departure lounge of Denpasar Airport. The picture above is actually a swing over the beach in Lombok, I…

Can’t put it off any longer, my vacation is nearly over and I need to get back to Bali. I don’t like Bali much. The Gilis have no motor vehicles; Lembongan has scooters; Bali is an unmitigated traffic hell. It’s so packed with scooters and cars that scooters sprint on sidewalks to get ahead. But…

My reason to return to Lembongan, and in fact Indonesia, is diving with mantas. There is a place south of Nusa Penida where mantas come to get cleaned by cleaner fish, which even enter the mantas’ mouth to remove remains of food and parasites. The mantas patiently wait their turn. However, mantas cannot stop in…

Nusa Lembongan has a mangrove forest in the northeast. The trees trunks are not rooted in the ground, but sit on a dense tangle of air roots that filter the water below. They run boat tours there; I found a tour guide with a boat on Lembongan’s sparsely populated north coast. Quite unlike the mangroves…

Time to get back into Bali’s neighborhood. Nusa Penida is the largest of the small islands east of Bali, and the least developed. I had previously visited its southern attractions like stunningly beautiful Kelingking Beach – I’ll include a photo I took in 2019 below – but now I wanted to check out the northern…

Gili Meno is a small amoeba-shaped island between Gili Air and Gili T. It’s the quietest of the three. The map shows a road that follows the shore, but it’s really just the beach and occasionally a sandy trail. Most relaxed road ever. They put some planks on the deep spots so the horse buggies…

Last day on Lombok, as usual visiting waterfalls. They have a lot of those on the slopes of the Rinjani volcano. The attraction is not just the water, but also the trek through the jungle to get there. This one, in the Geopark Rinjani, is exceptionally hilly, my poor guide (who cannot drink water due…

The southeast of Lombok is a peninsula with many perfect beaches that somehow no-one, not the tourists and not the developers, have discovered yet. There is almost nobody there. Maybe it’s the single narrow road with problematic pavement, but elsewhere such things get fixed with a four-lane freeway in no time. Well, I enjoyed it…

This was supposed to be an easy walk to a nearby waterfall, in the foothills of the Rinjani volcano. It turned out to be a hair-raising trek on steep hillsides, on slippery bamboo walkways high above the water with more gaps than steps, big wet boulders, and through streams, all in a narrow dark and…

Lombok is the next large island to the east of Bali. The Gili islands are just small specks right off its coast. A small boat got me across, and the driver whom I had booked was waiting for me. I had previously been to the touristy west and south coasts of Lombok, but never to…

There are a number of reefs north of the Gilis known for their abundance of turtles. They are huge, nearly a meter long, and some have cleaner fish attached to their backs. Lots of other wildlife, lionfish, muraines, sea cucumbers, clownfish, and more. Walked to the more remote parts of the island, had lunch at…

Gili Air is full of demon refugees from Bali and its near islands. You see, tomorrow the demons will inspect Bali to look for people. So if everyone stays home and there is nobody to be seen, the demons will be disappointed and leave the island for another year. Balinese demons are not very bright.…

The Gilis are three small islands off the coast of Lombok, the next large island to the east of Bali. Gili Trawangan is the party island, Gili Meno is boring, and Gili Air is the perfect balance between the two. The boat takes three hours and was packed, due to the demon situation on Bali.…

There are coral reefs all around the islands, some shallow and some on walls that fall off steeply. Global warming is bleaching corals everywhere, but here they are still mostly intact. There is a strong current, it’s like idly watching the sea life from a moving walkway. We stayed mostly in shallow waters, much of…

Finally, after three years of Corona, I am properly back in Asia! Back home we still occasionally get snow at night but here it’s 30+ degrees C. The taxi driver who took me from Bali’s Airport to the ferry harbor knew what snow is but has never seen it. I felt his hesitating curiosity at…

It happened that the hall of the my chosen villa was full of French and Quebecois people, including a couple who live nearby. They know all the best restaurants so we got on a flock of motorbikes and had an excellent lunch. Much of the afternoon we stayed at their place, a big house filled…

I seem to be having a lot of connectivity issues… Catching up. Diving on Gili Air, and enjoying the mellow atmosphere of the island that is so sadly missing on Gili T. Then on to a couple more days on Bali – but not in those frenetic southern towns, but in a villa out in…

The idea was to head east, but since the weather is turning rainy (and tropical rain means serious business) and the forecast east is just awful, I am turning west. When my connections didn’t work out and I got stuck in Lombok for many hours, my moto driver turned out to be a professional guide…

It takes time to reach Sumbawa – a boat from the Gilis to Lombok, the crossing Lombok to a harbor on the other side, then a ferry to Sumbawa. I arrived at the Yoyo’s Resort at 2 o’clock at night, after many hours in a very crowded minivan. A guy with a flashlight was waiting…

The Gilis are three small islands off the coast of Lombok,a few hours east of Bali. All three were badly hit by a magnitude-7.2 earthquake seven months ago. All cement structures collapsed, no building on the beach survived, and all three islands had to be completely evacuated. But now you can barely tell. There are…

Nusa Penida is another island near Bali, easily reachable from Lembongan. But the infrastructure is virtually nonexistent. A few villages, a few deeply rutted roads running up and down steep hills, and almost no people. Motorcycles are the best way to get around. The views down from the limestone cliffs and and a deep lake…

Plenty of dive centers on Lembongan. The highlight is Manta Point, a place some 15 meters under water where mantas come for cleaning. It’s essentially a big manta car wash where mantas wait in line, slowly circling, for their turn to be cleaned by several types of small fish. So you hove there and watch…

Off the south-eastern coast of Bali are three small islands, Nusa Lembongan, Nusa Ceningan, and Nusa Penida, that are said to be like Bali was 20 years ago / will be the next Bali. Quiet villages, white beaches, people who have time, no traffic, and no concrete resorts anywhere. From Bali’s Sanur harbor, Lembongan is…

The trouble with revisiting places, years later, is that they invariably have “improved” – more traffic, more noise, more concrete resorts at the beach, and more plastic garbage in the sand and the water. Some hotels have sewer pipes that color the water greenish brown. But people are still as friendly as always, and away…

There are huge concrete bunkers all around Pangkalan Bun and elsewhere, emitting loud birdsong. The birdsong comes from loudspeakers, with the intent to attract swallows to nest in the bunkers. When the young have left the nest, the nests are collected and sold to China, where they are eaten as an expensive delicacy.The nests are…

Pangkalan Bun has an original wooden palace, the kraton, three centuries old. I went there for a look. Turns out that they were in the last day of the traditional Initiation rites. The main hall was covered in golden drapes, and everybody wore yellow or traditional tribal costumes made of tree bark. The son of…

I was walking down the waterfront boardwalk of Pangkalan Bun to the market, enjoying chatting with the locals. One of them was an English teacher at a primary school nearby, and he asked me if I wanted to visit his school and let the children practice some English. Sure! The school had a large yard…

There’s a village across the Sekonyer river, just outside the national park. People there used to be farmers, but there is a palm oil Plantation nearby and the fertilizer runoff and the extremely high water use for Palm oil production has poisoned their soil, so no more farming. When the villagers protested, the farm oil…

In the 1950s, Professor Leakey sent out three researchers out to Africa and Indonesia to study primates: Jane Goodall, Dian Foster, and Birute Galdikas. Galdikas still lives in Pangkalan Bun on Borneo and runs a hospital. Her research camp can be reached by boat up the Sekonyer river from Pangkalan Bun, and a little hiking…