Chilling on Gili T....

So after the excitement of my birthday we still had another 2 days of fun ahead of us on the beautiful island of Gili T. We decided to make the most of the warm sunny weather and spend our days lazing on the beach in an attempt to top up our tans. It's a hard life!
Having splurged our money for my birthday, we had to keep spending to a minimum for the next few days and kept our eyes open for cheap places to eat. What a mistake! We ended up with grey vegetable soup and stale bread for our lunch and fatty chicken satay sticks with rice from a night market stall. All in all pretty nasty and not enjoyable in the slightest. What we lacked in food we made up for in Bintangs and biscuits, classic stuff hey!
The following day, lessons learnt and ready to enjoy our final day, we set off to the beach and hired some snorkelling masks and fins. I can honestly say I think that it was the best £4 we have spent so far on our trip, snorkelling is amazing! I can't believe that we've never done it before. Tom was straight in with his snorkel and fins to suss out the best places. He was gone for ages and came back with a huge grin on his face, deperate to take me in and show me. It took me a while to get used to using the snorkel, I was not a natural by any means! I mean really, having a mask squished tight to your face and clamping your mouth around a piece of plastic that hundreds of people have used took me a while to get past. You can imagine how frustrated Tom got with my cleanliness issues! Anyway, once in the water and able to breathe with the snorkel thing without freaking out, we had an amazing time. The water was crystal clear and filled with schools of fish of every colour possible. I wish we had had an underwater camera to use to show you what we could see. I'm not a fish expert so I can't tell you exactly the fish we saw but I recognised lots of them from Finding Nemo! Seriously though, we did see squids, lobsters and huge schools of bright blue fish that swam right beneath us. Truly awesome!
So after a hard day snorkelling we took some time to chill out on the beach. Suddenly we were surrounded by a group of Lombok school children asking us to sign their exercise books and have photos taken with us - fame at last! They were full of questions for us too asking where we were from and why we had come to Lombok. Soon their teacher appeared, honestly the most laid back person I have ever met! It turns out that he and three other teachers had brought 100 of their students to the Gilis to meet the tourists (that's 4 teachers to 100 children!!) He was loving using every cheesy English turn of phrase at the end of every sentence he spoke. For every phrase he used (eg. 'sound as a pound brother') he high fived Tom as a seal of approval. Good God! Aside from this, he was a lovely guy and we agreed to meet him the next day to talk to the rest of the children so that they could practice their English and meet people from England. The kids were really sweet and bombarded us with questions and flashes from their cameras. The boys spoke to Tom about their favourite football teams (they are obsessed with the Premier League) and even told him that he looked like David Beckham! The girls chatted to me about their favourite music, films and books. They loved looking through the books that we had in our bags from the beach, especially our Lonely Planet guide for Bali and Lombok. We left with promises of a personal tour around their school in Materam and the area should we ever go back to Lombok.
For our last evening on the island we had one final splurge and ate at a seafood barbeque. They had a huge bbq outside the restaurant with a huge fish counter where you could select the food you wanted and then watch it being cooked! You could then choose from an amazing salad bar and fill your boots basically. Tom was in his element, as usual when it comes to food! We ate red snapper and a seafood kebab, which totally made up for the dodgy food we had the previous day (thank god!)
Sadly, we had to leave the following day and I honestly can't put into words how truly horrific our boat crossing was back to the mainland, other than I thought we were going to die! I never in my life want to be on a boat that gets pummelled from all sides by huge waves so that it almost tips over. Or have the sea disappear completely from beneath the boat so it hangs in mid air, then crashes down so hard that it almost gives you whiplash. Do you get the idea? Add to that the fact that a similar boat (all be it a much smaller boat but still) capsized a few days before in bad weather, killing many of its passengers, then you might just get my mindset during this trip. We were both sweaty messes by the time we got off the boat and heaved oursleves up onto dry land in Padang bai. Who would've thought we would be so pleased to be back there?! No sooner had we stepped off the boat, we were then ushered into a mini bus and set off to the Benidorm of the island, Kuta, for our last 2 days in Bali. How much more excitement can we squeeze into 2 days?
Lots of love Shell xxx