By Golly, I’m On Gili!

First published In Garuda Airlines Magazine, Colors, November 2015

It's  4 a.m. and the muezzin's call to prayer floats gently through the pre – dawn darkness weaving its way across the coconut plantations and slowly rousing the local population.  I lie awake and listen to his imploring tone calling the faithful and find it comforting.

I am on Gili Air and, as usual, it has taken just a few hours to slip into the impossibly slow pace of life in the land of the Lotus Eaters.

This tiny island lying with her sister islands Gili Meno and Gili Trewangan in the lee of the much larger Lombok island just a couple of kilometers away. Mt Ranjani, Indonesia’s highest volcano, sits like a brooding giant on Lombok’s western shores providing a stunning backdrop across a bay whose azure blue waters are infused with every shade of blue and green imaginable.

Legend has it that long ago the Gods cast giant rocks from the depths of Ranjani and once they landed, the warm tropical waters turned them into precious jewels. And jewels they are with beaches blessed with sand as white as snow surround all three, washed gently by warm waters of the Lombok Sea alive with multi coloured fish, turtles and abundant coral gardens.

 Gili Air, like the others is small, and walking around its circumference can take barely an hour or so at the preferred pace of ‘dead slow’ depending on the time of day, for in the early afternoon the heat can be unbearably fierce. This tiny spec of land seems to draw me back to her time and time again like a siren calling plaintively from the sea for there is something almost magical here. However, with each subsequent visit I begin to notice the changes.

 The road skirting the island runs through a couple of tiny ‘villages,’ each immaculately presented with the sandy roads swept each morning …nothing looks out of place. Multi- coloured fishing boats lines the shores, their prows facing the beach bob in unison like horses in harness. Beach bars are conveniently spaced all along the shore front from which, no matter the time of day, Bob Marley and Jack Johnson tunes filter into the shimmering heat. It seems almost criminal not to stop, take a seat and quench one’s thirst with an ice cold Bintang.

There are no cars or motorcycles on the islands and the only traffic are small carts pulled by ponies carrying tourists to their destinations or produce to the various stores. Consequently the only traffic noise that you will hear during your stay is the tinkling of the numerous bells attached to the harnesses around the horse’s necks.

In the ten or so years I have been coming here I have noticed that, like anywhere where tourism has taken root, change inevitably follows. Once these islands were traveller’s havens, far off the beaten track and not that easy to get to. Today fast boats whizz tourists in comfortable air – conditioned surroundings from three separate points in Bali and will have you here within ninety minutes meaning more and more international travellers come each year.

The banjars, or local councils administering the islands have lately set their sights on the ‘well healed ‘ tourists, which obviously is where the ‘money’ is. Slowly but surely  ‘the rough and ready’ home stays and slightly run down villas, complete with bad plumbing are all but gone replaced by ” Le Hotel Boutique’.

 They are, to be fair, well run, comfortable and have the mandatory plunge pool where guests doze away the afternoon in splendid isolation, an attentive ‘pool boy’ a mere hand wave away.

These little hideaways that line the beaches or sit amid coconut plantations in the middle of the island have had wonderfully clichéd monikers bestowed on them by plagiaristic marketing types…Smugglers Cove, Pirate Bay, Coconut Grove etc.…. you get the picture.

I would make an assumption that in the last five years this island has become 99% dependent on tourism and the dollars it brings with it. The sunburned foreigner, coated in suntan oil is now a plentiful crop that must be nurtured and harvested each day.

With the help of the coral reefs, the blindingly white sand and sunsets that appear created by Turner it has a lot to offer those wanting time ‘away from it all’ and the Gili’s provide that in spades. But tourism can and indeed does slowly kill these paradises by sheer weight of numbers that, according to tourism statistics grow each year.

Water is scarce, all food has to be brought in from Lombok or Bali and the power needs grow each season… soon, even this little environment will have to say, enough is enough. However until then it will lure me back with its charms, it’s laid-back attitude, its astonishing beauty, sublime sunsets, its inhabitants who smile so easily, and the joy of?. …Well …just being here for, in a way, it's very much like heaven on earth.

Photographs copyright Paul v Walters & E.J Lenahan