The Gili islands, located off the coast of Lombok, Indonesia, comprise of three small islands: Gili Air, Gili Meno and Gili Trawangan. Gili Trawangan, the island that I stayed on during my trip, is the largest of the three islands and has a population of about 700 and it's also the most popular tourist destination.
As soon as we got off the boat you could immediately notice and feel the laid back attitude of the island. A stunning beach filled with bronzed bodies just lazing around on the white sands was the first thing you could see and it really did look like paradise, something you would only see on a postcard. Then you notice that there are no cars or motorcycles anywhere in sight, only horse-drawn carriages and bicycles, so all you can hear is the crashing of the waves and the bells that adorned the horse carriages. Police aren't even allowed to come onto the islands so they have "island security" which you'd often see at night, at the bars with you, most likely just as drunk as you. Although Gili Trawangan is the largest of the Gili Islands you could still walk from one end of the island to the other in less than an hour.
I was fortunate to have the opportunity to get my Open Water scuba certification done here. My first scuba experience was while I was in Australia in August 2010 where I got to dive the Great Barrier Reef. Going into my Asia trip I knew that I would get my certification as soon as possible because of all the opportunities I would have to go diving over the three months, and an added bonus was that it is significantly cheaper to get certified in Asia than it is here, in Canada. The waters were absolutely crystal clear and such a vibrant blue so it's no surprise that one of favorite dives was here. I also had a pretty great group of people from my trip also getting certified so there was lots of joking around, from singing Justin Beiber on the boat rides out to our dive spots, to ballroom dancing underwater.
The night life was also never disappointing. Every other night there would be big parties thrown by one of the main bars on the island. These parties would bring out the entire island and people would fill the bars and the one main street until the early hours of the morning. The Gili islands were also famous for the fact that you could legally get mushrooms just about anywhere. Literally every other store sold mushroom shakes or various food items with mushrooms. And I'm not talking about regular mushrooms... ;)
One of my favorite things about this island were the absolutely beautiful sunsets every evening that we would watch from the rocks by the closed down Sunset Bar and how bright the stars were every single night. There's something about the stars in the Southern Hemisphere that are so much more breathtaking. They're brighter and more clustered together in comparison to the stars we have here in the Northern Hemisphere. Every night when I'd be walking to our rooms, about to get ready for a night out or just heading home from a night of drinking I'd look up with whoever I was with, it somehow almost always ended up being Briana, and we'd just stand and stare at the sky.
The only word that does the Gili Islands any justice would be paradise. This is definitely on the top of my list of places I want to revisit. I could easy spend a few weeks here, just relaxing and diving and not being bothered by the hustle and bustle of the real world occurring outside of the island.
One tip though, if you're ever there be wary of their ATM machines, especially on Sundays, because sometimes they like to eat your debit/credit cards and it's a huge ordeal trying to get them back. It happened to a friend of mine and she didn't end up getting it back despite all her efforts. Other then that though, this place is perfection! Also, another strange observation my friends and I made was that there were many cats on the island, but we never once saw a dog..
