June 2, 2015
Snorkelling around Lombok: I don't want to make a big thing about it, but this was my last day in Asia
The first of June was another day spent at sea and neither Tom nor I had any great motivation to participate in any more competitions. For Tom it was the realisation that Josh must have given away his whole stock of champagne already, whilst for me it was the realisation that I didn’t own any paper nor any keys, and therefore had no great need for the pen or keyring I’d already secured, and certainly had no requirement to win more. The buffet had also begun to lose its appeal, and now that we were both too fat to walk up to deck 14 we laid in our twin beds and watched the Lego movie, which to be fair was pretty much awesome. I also had to concede that, against all odds, Tom had turned out to be not such a bad roommate. We had a cleaner who came in and tidied up his stuff each morning and I’d found some ear-plugs that muffled the nightly farting noise. And once I’d trained him to shut the bathroom door when peeing everything was just fine.
I did manage to get out of bed eventually and headed up to the pool where I found Briony sunbathing alone. I sat with her and we talked for a while. It wasn’t hard to understand the interest Rob and Tom had in her. She was a sweet young girl and I’d have to say a decent candidate for the second most beautiful girl in the world too. Of course it wasn’t long before Rob turned up, it seemed like he was never far from Briony, and, although he didn’t seem to be making much progress, I left the two of them to it and turned my attention to catching up with some journal writing.
The rest of the day slipped away from me without more drama, until I returned to the cabin in the evening and Tom came bursting in all excited. Apparently he had just been serenading Briony with his guitar and got a peck on the cheek, right in front of Rob. Things were heating up.
The next morning we woke up back in Indonesian waters. The Dawn Princess had docked in a bay next to the island of Lombok, our final stop before Australia, and we were surrounded by volcanic green mountains. Because of the shallow waters it was necessary to take a tender boat from the ship to land, although this was almost a luxury ferry in itself. Disembarking this we found not the happy attention we’d had in Sumatra, but dishonest money changers and children begging for money. It’s something to be expected when stepping off a cruise ship though I suppose.
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Wandering away from the crowds we found some semi-trustable people who said they could organise a boat to take us to the nearby small island of Gili Nanggu, where my research told me there would be good snorkelling right off the beach. We would have an English speaking guide thrown into the bargain, a friendly young guy named Echo, who we befriended as we waited quite a while for the boat to show up. When it did we saw that it was a little outrigger, a narrow wooden boat with long wooden logs on either side, held on by long arched supports. There were lots of these funny little boats, skimming around the bay like water boatmen.
The boat took a little less than an hour to get to the tiny island of Gili Nanggu where it pulled up at a small dock surrounded by turquoise water. The sandy beach had quite a few people on it but it was still a little corner of paradise. We rented masks and snorkels and headed back to the beach where I was surprised to see Briony emerging from the sea, Rob just behind of course. They had also rented a little outrigger, which must have had considerably better time-keeping than ours, because they’d already been here a while and had time to go in for a snorkel. Making up their party of four were Briony’s parents, who she was on the cruise with and who, I assumed, were having kittens about all the interest in their daughter.
The snorkelling was really great. There was a lot of coral just off the beach and brightly coloured fish were in abundance. I didn’t have a waterproof camera of course, and, after ruining my last camera whilst snorkelling in Koh Lipe, this time I didn’t even risk taking it off the ship, which explains the lack of photos of Gili Nanggu. Don’t worry though, a lot of the fish were the same, so I’ll just recycle an old image. The main difference this time was the absence of that pink and grey one that swam towards me in Koh Lipe, and this time there were lots of electric blue little guys. Here’s a very accurate interpretation of what I saw:
Back on the beach I sat with Briony and we tried to look for Tom, but we couldn’t see him. “He swam over there,” Briony’s mum informed us, pointing half a mile away to a neighbouring island. He really did do some strange things, did dear Tom.
Eventually he swam back, by which time the others were heading off to another island themselves, although they were taking the easy option and going by boat. Tom, fresh from his swim, ran up the beach and immediately went up to a hot girl in a bikini and started talking to her. This was an impressive implementation of the ‘three second rule’ from the pick-up book. Essentially this rule means that you have to go up and talk to a girl within three seconds of seeing her, to avoid letting negative thoughts enter your head. I guess it’s a useful tool to get you talking to more girls, but of course the trouble with the three second rule, as Tom was about to find out to his cost, was that it doesn’t give you time to look around the vicinity for boyfriends. “Hello mate” came a voice from behind him.
We took the little boat back as fast as we could. What I found most strange about Tom approaching that particular girl was not that he had the confidence to do it, which I should say I did find considerably strange, but that he did it all considering that both the girl and her boyfriend were also travelling on the Dawn Princess and we’d seen them together every day.
Once back at the port Echo turned less friendly and started asking for more money than we had originally agreed on, which was bad luck for him because we didn’t have any more money than that which we had originally agreed on. Leaving him looking slightly forlorn we waded our way back through the poor children forced by some unseen adults to beg us for money and onto our tender boat, and that was the end of Indonesia. In fact that was the end of Asia, and I said as much to Tom as soon as we were on the boat. “That’ll be the last time either of us set foot in Asia for a while.”
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It wasn’t until a little later on that the fact that Asia was over really hit home. I went up to watch the sunset from the top deck, a little thing that I did every day, with music playing through my Mp3 player. It was a nice thing to do, because there were some great views from up top and not many people went up there, so I could have them to myself. It was particularly useful to be on my own on this day, because as an especially personal song came on and I looked out at the Indonesian mountains across the bay I was suddenly overwhelmed with emotion and quite unexpectedly and for reasons I didn’t entirely understand I began to cry uncontrollably. The tears came and came. I was blubbing like a baby, yet I felt neither happy nor sad. It was simply an incredible release of emotion at the fact that Asia was finally over. It had been so incredibly difficult at times, and I remembered those times now, most of which had been in China. I thought back on the accident I’d witnessed during my last days in Mongolia, the terrible loneliness that greeted me when I arrived in China just after that and the seemingly impossible challenge that I could ever recover from that and cycle across that whole massive country, that I could ever reach the end of Asia and set sail for an easier life in Australia, that I could ever make it to this moment.
But I had made it to this moment.
The sky turned pink, the boat sailed away, and Asia was gone.
Next stop Australia.
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