A couple years ago while on Pulau Tioman in Malaysia, we’d heard about Bangko Bangko from a fellow diver who also surfed. Situated on the extreme south west tip of Lombok, this little village was really tough to get to, hence it’s draw for surfers who are genetically programmed to covet the difficult to reach, out of the way breaks in places that have no electricity or water. Once out of the groovy little village and around the coast the waves were spectacular and the water was a gorgeous cobalt blue. There were no guest houses and we didn’t have a tent so we backtracked to the Bola Bola Resort in Berambang for the night. The next morning the uber-cool receptionist/ manager of the Bola Bola (below with the Truth T-shirt on) told us to check out a bay that was south over the mountain. As the motorbike crawled towards the summit we were greeted with a view like none other. The Indian Ocean swept into a bay surrounded hills that were topped by forest. One hut was the only hint of humanity. On the way back we passed a few Balinese Hindu temples which was strange (because we weren't on Bali) and we also kept seeing awnings over big drums being turned by diesel motors. It turns out that gold had been found a few years ago and all the property owners (and squatters) were mining the hills and using the drums to separate the rocks from the treasure. This accounted for the strip mining we saw on the mountains.

Someone told us to check out Secret Bay Resort on Gili Gede near the Bola Bola. Sounded good so we did. The boat ride over was breathtaking and we were salivating at the possibility of spending at least one a night there. However, stepping through the gates was pretty anticlimactic. The owner was a very nice guy but the place was a shining example of why you should hire an architect and an interior designer when embarking on such a project. Uuuuuugly! Also, in the quest to build his utopia, the guy had stripped the back side of his hill of almost all vegetation and by the lean of the buildings you could easily tell they had been built with substandard materials with shoddy craftsmanship. And, and this is a big “AND”, the lack of vegetation on the west side of his property means that the rainwater just rips the soil from the land and settles in the water. What was once a beautiful underwater coral paradise loaded with fish is now covered in silt. Sadly, when snorkeling you can see the ridge of muck that ends at his property line. There was one very redeeming quality to the resort however. Off to the west of the island he had build a little wooden boat house as accommodation. It was amazing. The place tickled every Swiss Family Robinson bone in my body. The interior was an funky mix of old wood from boats and Javanese houses. The gentle lapping of the waves sent us off to slumberland in seconds.

As I said before, riding a motorbike is great but we averaged 5-7 hours a day being blown around the road by trucks, being driven off the road by packs of high school boys, and just feeling lucky when we actually had a "road" to drive on. The little Honda 110 was a real trooper, but after 10 days we were both feeling like our butts/kidneys/spines/shoulders/brains needed a few days of R+R and we also wanteed to catch up on the news (TV – yeah!!!) and reading before heading back to Gili T. Upon leaving Gili Gede, we rode past the harbor and up through the quagmire of Mataram to the Crocodile Lodge in Senggigi. The hotel was top notch, and in view of our tired "everythings", we decided to take a "River Relaxation" boat ride that was very lovely and relaxing on a wonderfully crafted hand-made bamboo raft, but in parts became more like slogging through a landfill as we passed banks piled with plastic refuse - trash management is still an issue in much of Indonesia. And after what I saw bobbing about in one part of the river, I will never eat water spinach again!!

We'd had an amazing trip but it was time to get back to the Eco Trust. Our time on Gili Trawangan was coming to a close and there were a lot of projects we wanted to wrap up. So off we went, but not before....

Look at this imbecile below: This is the face of a corrupt cop! A really dumb one at that. Look in those eyes…see it? Lights on but no one's home! This shining star stopped us in order to extract a fee for going to the jetty on Lombok. In the 15+ times we’ve been to and from this particular jetty, Helen nor I have ever been asked to pay a fee before, so I refused. He got huffy, wanted me to get out of the car and I refused that too. He stood bewildered for a while until he produced some kind of rumpled old tariff ticket that was, of course, written in Indonesian so it could have been a ticket to the local cock fights for all I know. The moronic twit failed to realize that the price of the tariff was listed on the ticket and he was asking us to pay 5 times the ticket price. Our driver started to sweat and had that look of trying to become invisible so we paid, but not what the cop wanted. We paid the listed price. He tried to get away with giving us one ticket but we demanded two tickets so if this was an official ticket he would have to be accountable for every rupiah we gave him. There is a huge problem with corrupt officials in Indonesia and it’s idiots like this who can be found in every village, every town, and every city that keep this beautiful country from living up to its full potential. I apologize to all the good cops in SE Asia, but my general rule of thumb is that if they have epaulettes on their shoulders, they’re dirty.