WELCOME TO PARADISE - Indonesia PT. 3

The Gili Islands can be described in no other way than paradise, if you think you have seen beautiful white sand beaches and transparent water you haven't seen anything until you've been here.

Stepping off the boat onto the white sand beach had us all gobsmacked, we couldn't believe it, photographs do not give this place justice. We were staying on Gili T for the next few days (in actual fact it turned into nearly 7 days as we extended our stay) and we couldn't believe it. The island doesn't have any form of motor vehicle, everything was either by bike, foot or (to our dismay) horse and cart.

After walking for what seemed like miles in bare feet (which were now very, very burnt and blistered) we arrived at our bungalows, the CUTEST little bungalow rooms in the world, with the cutest lady and not so cute man (tried to sell us drugs on our first night, much to our disgust, lol) as the owners.

If you are an adventurous kind of person and can't sit around for long then the Gili Islands are probably not for you as it's just water and beach, however, we found a few things that made our stay even better.

Sunset Point -

When visiting Gili you will have heard about sunset point and the famous swings, where you MUST get a photo (we went for photographs in the day and there was only 2 or 3 other people there, whereas when you go at night you are queuing for a quick photo). The sunset is amazing, we went 3 times to sunset point and 2 out of the 3 times is was beautiful!!!

The island is only very tiny and therefore renting some bikes for the day was totally worth it. To bike around the whole island it only takes 1 and a half hours and meant that you got to see the island from all different parts and it was as equally beautiful the whole way round. I would recommend doing this as it was so much fun and makes life a lot easier not having to walk everywhere.

As you can imagine there was a lot of tourist stands trying to sell fast boats and tourist activities, one we really wanted to do was snorkelling. This meant we got a small boat (with all the equiptment included) to different parts of the three island do see coral, wrecks and turtles, YES TURTLES, I GOT TO SWIM NEXT TO TURTLES!!!!! you also got a couple of hours stop at one of the neighbouring islands for some lunch (which was very, very tiny). This was definitely worth the money and was an experience we'll never forget, although if you don't like swimming or water or fish or ANYTHING to do with snorkelling I wouldn't pay all that money to sit on a boat like 3 women on our trip did.

When I mentioned in my last post about food, I said you lived like kings, however, Gili Islands was a whole new level of living like kings, the food was so so so cheap and incredible!!! Our first night we were there we went to a restaurant near our villa, however, little did we know that only a 5/10 minute walk down the street was a food market. YES, A MARKET FULL OF FOOD!!! (Can you ask for anything better!) When we got there we were actually amazed, the stalls were selling 5 items (this ranged from chicken, to noodles, to tofu, to fish, to soya, to potato, you name it is was there) for $20,000 (this equals around £1 in UK money) and the portion sizes were HUGE. I couldn't get over it. There was people selling smoothies, cakes, ice cream, everything! So, every night since after the first night we came here and ate like kings, who cares about restaurants when you can eat portions double the size of England's for £1!

As well as eating this at night, we were buying hot dogs, ice creams, pastries all throughout the day for cheap as well, I probably put on about 2 stone just on the Gili Islands from the amount I ate! (*WARNING* don't have Bintang it's VILE).

After probably the BEST week of my life, we were now onto our last stop of the holiday which was 2 days in Lombok, Indonesia (Kuta).

Lombok, was a very different vibe to Gili Islands, it's still very much in construction. When we first arrived we pulled up a little community where a family were running a homestay with lots of animals and babies running around all over the place, we weren't quite sure where we had booked to stay, but by the end we loved it. There wasn't much to do in Lombok apart from beaches and restaurants, even the shops only really had sarongs to sell, but as we were going to be travelling home we wanted a relaxed couple of days and thats what we got, sun, wind and sea.

One thing I would say is don't expect quick service from the restaurants as we had to wait a whole 1 hour and 10 minutes for our food, which should have took about 20 minutes to make (you can imagine how fuming we were after waiting that long).

Well, that's the end of that, after 3 flights in under 24 hours we were back on home ground. All I can say was Indonesia you were amazing. I couldn't have asked for a more special 3 weeks travelling. Sophie, Amy and Brad were the BEST travelling partners and I hope we can do it again some time. Indonesia, thank you.

Hannah x

(more photos on my website, go check them out)

P.S if you want to know anything about places we travelled or the prices of any of them, email me and i'll explain everything.