Our boat from Bali lands at Trawangan and we get off there as we know we’ll find accommodation and hope to strike a good balance between action and secluded relaxation here. The first impression is pretty good, the sand is fine and bright, the water is clear and deep blue and it doesn’t look very crowded at all. There are a few touts trying to sell us into one accommodation or another but we just sit down on the beach for a while until the new arrivals crowd has dispersed and then we begin our search.

It turns out the island is pretty busy on the Southeast side, lots of people, bars and restaurants competing late into the night. Diving resorts and bungalows packed neatly next to one another. – Thank goodness we’ve come off season! If you walk further inland there are a few more out-of-the-way guest houses with cheap rates, but in a place like this you want to be at the beach!

After about 3 hours walking the coast line and bargaining for room rates, we find a nice accommodation on Northeast side called Beach Bungalow (120KRp/night, quite cheap compared to the centre). The breakfast (included) leaves much to be desired though and the staff are rather lethargic. But it’s away from the party zone, well away from the mosque which threatens to wake us up at inhospitable hours of the morning, and it’s right at the beach front. Of course we have a 15min walk to get to the main market, but this is a price worth paying. (This is confirmed to us several times by other guests that move up to Beach Bungalow from accommodations in the centre, due to lack of undisturbed sleep.)

Not keen to entertain more blood-boiling encounters with Bemo drivers, we decide to spend the rest of our Indonesian stay here and take it easy.

We get up in the mornings, have a breakfast and then commit ourselves to the sea for a few hours, swimming or snorkeling. Sometimes we take a walk to the centre to buy food and drink supplies and drink a good cup of coffee. In the afternoons I generally swim out and go fishing from one of the boats anchored out in the channel while Ebru sunbathes or does more snorkeling. It’s a great pace of life.

The snorkeling is fantastic around the North side of the island where the reef extends over a hundred metres out and depths reach at least ten to fifteen metres. Fish are abundant and a spectacular show of colour! We’re really gutted that we don’t have underwater camera equipment. It’s less spectacular on the East side but even here we encounter lion and scorpion fish on one occasion. Also they have a turtle sanctuary on the island, so sea turtles can be seen almost daily.

Unfortunately I cannot say that much for the fishing. I do all my fishing in the channel on the East side and occasionally off the diesel tanker that brings the generator fuel daily. But all I catch is so small it’s only good for fish food. For anyone going, please note that fishing supplies can be found in a couple of shops just around the back streets behind the night market. (Make sure you go alone so your wife/girlfriend doesn’t see you buying more fishing tackle AGAIN!)

(Mainstream media failed to inform you of the latest threat: the Suicide Fisherman!)

We get to know some good people at the Beach Bungalow as well. As I recall it, each couple moved in next door to us after a rather disturbing episode closer to the town centre (noise, obnoxious guests etc), so they decided to find a place where they could get some sleep. Here they are:

Ruth and Roel from Holland. It was really funny having a dinner with them one night, as it turned out they seem to be undergoing the same interesting behavioural phenomena on their travels: she plans everything and pushes to keep on schedule; he doesn’t care how long it taked as long as the beer is cold and they’re having a good time. LOL!

Cecelia (Uruguay) and Carsten (Denmark)

At the History Bungalows just a few metres down from us we meet a chap called Chaia. He’s from Lombok, a rice farmer, but has come here to earn some extra cash. He’s helpful and honest, and we immediately become befriended.

This is a place where everybody will bargain with you for the last buck but not him, and that is something we really appreciate. His bungalows are pretty quiet at the moment but we spend a few nights over at his bar, hanging out and talking about life in Indonesia and elsewhere, and he introduces us to a local rice wine, which is non-alcoholic but gets its kick from a type of tree bark – lovely stuff! Chaia I hope you read this some day. We were so happy to have met you and really enjoyed spending time with you on Gili. If we make it to Lombok again some day we’ll try to look you up. And thanks for letting us plant our tree for our Planting Around the World mission!

Walking around the rest of the island (about an hour) there’s not much to be found but a few resorts which look rather empty, there is one great secluded bar on the north side and on the West somewhere they have the full moon parties, but that’s about it. The only place we visit in town worth mentioning is a night at Sama Sama where they have live music and a good vibe.

Regarding food, we’re unfortunately still struggling to find something we like, as with the rest of Indonesia, but the our best meals and definitely the best value for money is to be found at the night market. Several stalls are waiting to grill you a fresh fish to serve with salad, and some other stalls sell various vegetable dishes to accompany. I don’t think we ever spend more than 50KRp for a fresh fish meal for two. And aside from that, a must try is the pumpkin curry from the old lady’s shop in the alley just off the market. Just ask around and you’re sure to find it.

Now in truth, there’s nothing much I can muster in words to convey to you the absolute tranquility and awe we felt in this place, waking up to its simple beauty day after day and letting the picture-perfect vistas wash over our optic nerves with the sound of the water rushing over coral sand. Shorts & flip-flops day in, day out (no shirt required). Sun tanning you right to the bone. We were transported away. Hypnotized. Conscious, yet dreaming.

So instead I give you these photographs to explain as best they can. Enjoy….

Once in Padangbai we walk up the street away from the main ferry terminal where some touts have already come to sell to us, and approach the agency Perama Tours mentioned in the Rough Guide. Their guy says he can get us on the speed boat to the Gilis direct for 350KRp/pp. We also consult an agency next door (which looks more like a temporary establishment) who promise the same trip for 250KRp/pp, just using a different boat company (Mahi Mahi). Since it sounds too good to be true, I ask which boat companies they use and call up some of their offices directly using numbers from brochures and the rough guide. The details for all the departures match and so we agree with the agent that we’ll purchase the tickets from them but will only hand over cash once we and our baggage are on board the boat. This works out well and we’re on a speed boat en route to Gili Trawangan about an hour later.

The sea is quite choppy which makes the journey quite exciting (wet). What makes it even more rewarding is that it seems that most of the other tourists on the boat have paid about 600KRp for their tickets and we’ve got them at a bargain.

In fact, the guys at Padangbai also try to sell us the return tickets for 300KRp/pp. They state that the tickets are only sold at the 600KRp rate on the Gilis themselves. But we’ve been burnt too many times on Indonesia so we take our chances, and it turns out to be a good decision, because an agent on Gili Trawangan sells tickets at 250Krp as well.

RECOMMENDATIONS:
– Part with your money at the latest possible opportunity and don’t be misguided by a seller’s scare tactics.

There is a ferry port in Banyuwangi on Java where ferries leave for Bali daily. We have some loooong bus journeys coming from Bromo. In fact, the bus that is supposed to go directly to one destination once again stops short and we are shunted onto another bus to take us closer. It’s hot, it’s slow and even the entertainment, which consists of the buskers that hop on at almost every stop and then extend their hats for change, is not really doing anything to improve our mood. Even the taxi driver who transports us from the last bus stop to the ferry terminal only a kilometre or two away, with whom we had arranged the more than fair price of 5000Rp/pp decides upon arrival that he actually wants 20000Rp/pp once we get there. I am ready to murder him and get a bit of satisfaction from turning my back and walking off, seeing his expression as he realizes he might no receive a penny, the bastard.

To top it up the waters aren’t too calm between Java and Bali, so we spend about an hour or two floating near the Gilimanuk harbour until we can dock there at about 10 at night. Once off board we walk for more than an hour to find accommodation.

It’s a simple place named Sari Hotel and we’re lucky to get some food and a few beers in their little cafe before bed. There is some talk about visiting a nearby island for some snorkelling the next day. which Jasper tries to arrange, but it doesn’t work out and we board another bus (probably the slowest so far) out of here.

After a four hour journey and about an hour’s searching in the Lovina area, we find some beautiful accommodation by the fishing village (Anturan Kubu Gembong) on the East side of town. It’s called Mandhara Chico Bungalows, costs us 140KRp/night and has a pool and is also directly at the black sand beach (though this is quite a mess due to monsoon rains). The place is beautiful: rooms are clean and large, huge bathrooms with hot water, balconies. it’s well maintained with mosaic pebble floors on the patio before the rooms. Really the perfect retreat for us all after a few days of being cramped up and cold.

We stay put here a few days, renting scooters (around 50KRp/day) to look around Bali during the day, eating at the nearby Reggae Bar and local guesthouse cafe and drinking beer in the swimming pool until the wee hours.

The Balinese scenery if beautiful and the guest house is great. The only thing to test your patience here is the hawkers on the beach, waiting to pounce on you and sell wares from jewellery to massages. I even get some fishing done but don’t even get a nibble out here.

After Lovina we part ways with Karen and Jasper. They intend to visit Denpasar (which I am not keen on since I recon it’ll be tout’s paradise) and we only have about 10 days left here which we’d prefer to spend on a lovely little island somewhere. We say goodbye to our friends and depart via the North coast for Chandidasar (a number of bus/bemo changes involved), where we spend one night before heading to Padangbai to catch our ferry. We cannot make it all the way to Padangbai and the journey is a pain as there is a Hindu festival going on and we have to change from the limited bus services to bemos to get there and, naturally, we get ripped off a bit in the process.

This place is pretty touristical and pretty dead right now. Apparently used to be a bit hit years ago. Our night at Temple Bungalow costs us 140KRp/night (excl. breakfast) and the place is nothing special. Though one nice thing is that across the road we find a German bakery which also does dinner – all sorts of German stuff on the menu – and it’s actually good so we really dig in that night!

Karen and Jasper, we know it’s taken us far too long to write this post. We hope you’re safely back in Amsterdam and all is going well for you. Thanks for your good company over our time in Indonesia. When we next have the chance to visit Amsterdam we’ll pay you a visit in the Noorderlicht!

We get off the Koh Tao – Surat Thani night ferry and get tuk-tuk-ed away to a travel agency where we wait for a minivan to Krabi. I expect the main Raylei or Au Nang beaches to be pretty overrun, but we hope to find a beach further North, not too main-stream, where we can take it easy. While we wait we chat to another English chap we met on the tuk tuk on KohTao, and according to what he tells us, it sounds like Koh Phi Phi is the place we want to be: beautiful, remote, cheap and not too overrun. We scrap the idea of Krabi’s mainland beaches and are soon on the West coast, boarding a ferry to Phi Phi Don island.

The journey there is beautiful, the sea is blue, we see big fish jumping out of the water in the distance. Phi Phi itself looks spectacular as we approach it. Palm jungle topped cliffs, smooth yellow beaches; however minutes after we disembark and start our search for accommodation our hearts begin to sink: the place is like a termite mound, full of termites from Sweden, South Africa, England, Germany, Russia – it’s heaving! Most of the accommodation is full. The vast majority of budget accommodation (we have a look at just about every place in the backpacker area and a few in the town centre) is shabby, unclean, yet quite expensive (700THB+) and anything on the decent side of the scale sets you back 1500THB or more. The attitude of the guest house- and market stall owners is pushy and grumpy. Screw this for a holiday…

Aside from some luxury resorts scattered around the island (accessible by boat), saddled between the two rocky mounds there is one low-lying, inhabited strip of land, probably about 1km long, 100m wide, with a beach and bay on either side: Long beach on the South, Party beach on the North. Long beach is not too impressive but more quiet, although the entire bay is littered with boats. Party beach is beautiful but come 6PM you need ear muffs if you don’t want to damage your hearing. The music from these beach-front clubs is turned so loud that you cannot escape it. Even on the furthest opposite side of the strip where we stay, shielded by buildings and trees, we hear the booming through the night – like camping at Glastonbury festival.

We stay in the best location on the island as far as we’re concerned. It’s as far away from the commotion as you can get, behind the staff housing. A lady named Deng rents out a few bamboo bungalows there, clean and we get it at only 600THB per night (though we know prices went up to 800THB closer to Xmas). You do still hear the noise from Party Beach and the generator house is nearby, so you hear that running all night, but I think it’s the best you can get for the budget. Also Deng is really helpful and she lets us padlock our valuables in a rucksack and store it at her house for safekeeping during the day.

50 metres down the path at the beach front there’s a guy named Suleiman – he says he is Muslim but you’d be forgiven for thinking he’s perhaps Muslim-Rastafarian. He runs a little beach-bar-restaurant, very simple and away from it all. He originates from Phi Phi, from a fisherman family and he prepares set menus from the daily catch, authentic island style. Also he rents kayaks at a very reasonable rate (600THB/day), does fishing trips and is very helpful and accommodating.

We find what looks to us to be the most professional PADI dive centre (named Barakkuda) and enroll for our AOW (Advanced Open Water). We get new manuals and everything and they go about the knowledge reviews quite diligently. Our first day entails the deep- and navigation dives. Deep dive goes fine, we do some exercises at 30m and I find I am getting narc’ed at about 25m, which is quite an interesting experience. After that back to the boat for lunch (included) and off we go to the next dive site for the navigation dive. The navigation dive goes down the pan because we end up in a current which sweeps us way off course and we have to can the exercises and just treat it as a fun dive.

Back at the ranch, we arrange with the instructor to complete the exercises in shallow water in the afternoon as we’ve missed out and off we go to get some rest. At this point I start feeling really exhausted. I take a nap in the shade but don’t feel any better thereafter so we go back to the dive shop to tell the instructor we can’t do the afternoon and ask his advice about my condition. His response is to the effect, “if you’re not feeling itchy or numb you’re fine… so do you want to dive tomorrow?” If you talk to someone about lice your head will feel itchy thinking about it, and as I was examining myself it was pretty hard to tell, so I waited a bit longer, resting in our bungalow and soon I was vomiting like a fire hydrant. Off we go to the island hospital!

We’re obviously concerned about the possibility of decompression illness from the dives, but soon enough the doctor and nurse establish that I have a bacterial infection (I think from the chicken sandwich) and a fever of about 38 degrees, and I spend the rest of the night on a saline and antibiotic drip. This I have to repeat the next two days, followed by four days of tablets. A bit of a bummer, but it’s better than DCI (DeCompression Illness) and the nurse and doctor at the hospital are really excellent.

The dive instructor seemed a bit of a numpty because despite the symptoms I was describing, all he appeared to be interested in was whether we’d be diving the next day. The owner, at least, is professional enough to show some concern about my condition and gives us a discount on the dives we’ve done and sorts out the paperwork needed to let these count toward our certification, to be completed at another PADI centre at a later date. Choose your dive centres carefully kids!

Our best experience on Phi Phi is on our last two days: We arrange with a local boatsman named Ren to pick us up at 6AM and whisk us off to Phi Phi Leh island, the little one further to the South of Phi Phi Don.

It’s only beginning to dawn when we set off and we watch the sun rise over the sea on our way. At Phi Phi Leh, we are the first to arrive at Maya Bay (now famous for featuring in the movie The Beach).

This place is an absolute dream! Our boat runs ashore amongst dense schools of baby fish which we at first mistake for oil slick, but as you walk through them they separate like a blob around you. We spend an hour snorkeling there in crystal clear indigo waters, among beautiful reef fish and even a few back tip sharks. It is absolutely gorgeous!

If you don’t go really early in the morning though, the place is overrun by dozens of tour boats coming from Phuket and all over the place.

Ren also shows us a few other bays and lagoons around the island, where we swim some more and we return home around 10AM. (The whole thing costs us 1300THB).

We then pick up supplies and bait at the market and rent a kayak from Suleiman for a couple of days. He includes a cooler box and dry bag free of charge and gives us loads of advice about where we can go, camp and find food or help if we need it.

We set off paddling around the island, swimming and fishing. It’s great. Unfortunately I only catch one reef fish of edible size though.

At sunset we paddle to the deserted Lana Bay beach and set up our tent and a fire for cooking. Although we set up tent well away from the water, we later realize the tide is incoming and we have to move the thing further up-beach in the dark! Just what we need in our fatigued state!

We were exhausted, but the roasted vegetables and fish go down a treat, washed down with a couple of Leo beers. Then we sit on the beach for a while, no one else in sight, nothing to hear but jungle noises and the splashing up of the sea. Glowing green Phosphorus is visible in the waves and lays washed up on the white sand and glow worms flicker in the bushes and trees behind us. How romantic! Just too bad we’re so exhausted!

The next morning we get up early, I get the fire going and as we start cooking breakfast the first tour boats arrive. By the time food is ready, tourists are pouring off, setting up on the beach for their hour of paradise and everyone is surprised to see us there… two hobos with camping gear eating eggs and drinking hot coffee.

A funny thing is when we’re leaving Phi Phi, we notice that a few places are all decorated with Xmas tinsel and things, and for the first time we realize that it’s Christmas TOMORROW! and have to laugh at the fact that we completely by-passed the at-least-month’s worth of Xmas advertising that we’d have been surrounded by back home.

In conclusion, it must be said that the Phi Phi islands are without a doubt some of the most beautiful islands off Thailand and there are a fair few activities there (climbing, fishing, walking, diving, kayaking etc). If you’ve got an ample budget and are up for a few days of party with some interesting excursions in-between this is probably a good place to go. However if you’re looking to avoid large [drunken] crowds and want to enjoy a place of natural beauty and be able to get away from the fray, Phi Phi is not it – UNLESS maybe you have the budget to put yourself up in one of the secluded luxury resorts on the other sides of the island.

It’s straight off the overnight train from Bangkok to Chumpon, on to a bus that takes us to the 7AM ferry leaving for Koh Tao island. We’ve been told along the way that Koh Tao is a great and also very cheap place for diving, so we have to check it out. We still want to complete our PADI Advanced Open Water certificate so we can experience deep dive sites as well, and if we can save ourselves a few bucks on that it means more diving for us along the way.

The ferry trip is great; it’s a huge high speed catamaran and the humungous engines churn out a jaw-dropping mush of bubbling water at the back. Occasionally you can see those little flying fish flap out of the waves behind us. The whole vessel is bouncing up and down as we get further out into sea; jokingly I look at Ebru and act a vomiting motion.

Ten minutes later she’s vomiting – along with about twenty other people on the boat. It’s quite strange, sitting on this huge machine, gaping at its awesome power cutting through the sea, and around you there’s a load of walking corpses hanging around. Like something from a zombie film.

Unfortunately our visions of tropical islands have been heavily rose-tinted from our amazing time at Boracay and there’s not many places that’ll compare favourably to that. Koh Tao definitely does not! We only look at the main area (after sitting down at a cafe for an hour to get Ebru back on her land-legs) and there’s plenty of dive shops but only about 45cm of beach… during low tide! There are plenty of pateos  built to overcome this problem but it’s not what we’re looking for.

Accommodation is not cheap! Most of the places are dive resorts where you buy a dive package with your room included but we want to check the place out first and decide on the right dive centre for us first. Most of the places are renting out their rooms for 1500THB upward! The cheapest place we find – the only cheap place – offers us a less than hygienic bungalow for 700THB. We meet an American couple and they tell us more affordable accommodation is available about 2km out of town, but even there we’re looking at around 700THB.

Diving courses are definitely comparatively cheap: The A.O.W. course here will cost between 8- and 9000THB, compared to the average 12000THB on Koh Phi Phi and 14000THB on Phuket. However when we speak to some dive centres we’re not inspired with confidence. They all boast good teacher-student ratios of 4:1 and promise varying degrees of felxibility around the schedule. However, the sheer numbers of divers they process per day (at one school it was about 150 according their instructor) is slightly worrying. The clientelle were mostly young travellers, probably gap year students and not too worried about the safety aspect.

Though the equipment in general did look well maintained and was taken to and from boats in tog-bags, I saw one of the long-boats returning to shore packed like a tin of sardines with divers and equipment. I had to wonder how, had anything gone wrong, would they have managed to lay down the casualty on that boat without leaving people behind – or would he/she have laid on people’s laps? I don’t know but unfortunately this doesn’t look like the kind of place I want to learn diving; perhaps I’m too paranoid but if the shit hits the fan down there I want to be as capable as I can.

Also a bit shady was the whole arrangement with PADI books and tables which you (in my experience) normally get as part of the course. Here it was a case of lending you the books and tables for the duration or watching the DVDs… sorry, but if I’m paying to do a PADI certificate I want to walk away with the book and all the dive tables I need to plan my future dives.

We spend the following day WIFI-ing for a new destination and decide to leave Koh Tao the same evening on the Surat Thani night ferry, destined for Krabi and it’s renowned Au Nang beach.

The night ferry from Koh Tao to Surat Thani is an experience of note! It leaves at about 9PM and arrives at 6AM so you spend all night at sea. The inside of the boat has two decks the upper barely tall enough to stand up in and the lower more suitable to crawling. There are no compartments; there is a gangway down the centre of each deck, to the left and right of which there are camping mattresses with “bed” numbers painted above the – one big bedroom for everybody!

I get talking to a couple of English chaps next to me, we play a few hands of cards and one of them goes to sleep. Then I pull out my secret formula (cannot believe no one else on the boat thought of this): a small bottle of Sang Som (Thai rum) and a litre of Coke. We head outside and sit near the bow of the ship, just Ebru, the Englishman and I, surrounded by a calm sea and a crisp, starry sky above us. While the rest of the boat is sleeping we’re chatting, drinking Rum-Coke and smoking cigarettes outside – absolutely beautiful! The only other commotion around is music and laughter from the roof of the boat, where the crew are apparently also travelling in style. I decide to sleep out there on the open deck that night and it’s a restful sleep – just like sleeping in the garden in Reading back ‘home’ (but not in winter).