Our Boxing Day arrival on Gili Trawangan was a slight shock to the system – mostly in a good way! After cities full of cars, trucks and motorbikes, here the only forms of land transport are bikes and horse & carts! Also after a lifetime of freshwater showers, here the only ones available (in our budget) are salt-water!
Seeing dolphins en route here was a treat, although we have very little photo evidence of this encounter as they don’t stay still at all and move incredibly fast. We’ve seen lots of other wildlife here – although mainly under the water doing our advanced SCUBA diving course. We have seen lots of turtles (including one massive one – about 1.5m long), some white-tip reef sharks (well, Alex did, Lizzy managed to miss them!), octopuses, cuttlefish, clown fish (aka Nemo) and loads of other fish & coral. Despite diving at “Manta Point”, we haven’t yet seen manta rays, just their younger cousins sting rays. Visibility is amazing – mostly 20-30m and the water is 28-30 degrees – WOW! We’ve done 4 dives so far and have another 2 planned, including a deep Nitrox dive, on which Lizzy hopes to see the sharks this time.
We’re staying another 4 nights here, until after New Year… although it is tempting to live out here for a few years and work as dive instructors (After doing our rescue & dive master qualificatioons – about 8 weeks’ training and about $750 – not bad for all the dives you can handle and learning a new profession in the mean time!). So if we’re not heard of again, this is probably the best place to look. Internet (and electricity) isn’t great here though, so can’t upload photos… will endeavour to do that somewhere in Java.
😀
don’t leave me forever, i can only cope knowing it’s not permenant!!! waaaah!
Hummm, could come join u i guess for a diving course or 10 though! ;o)
Love u!
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