Chickens and Chanters, Gili Trawangan, Indonesia

Our place in Gili Trawangan is great. It's an upstairs room where we can catch a cooling breeze, that's nicely furnished with a shared outdoor living room area. We negotiated it for 80,000 rupias per night, roughly $8, which we were pretty happy about. It's very comfortable and restful, however we didn't sleep well during our first night.

Many chickens run around on this island, and at any point in the night (not just the early morning) if one of them decides to let off a cackle, it sets off a chain reaction of chickens cackling in turn across the entire island. The first one nearby wakes you up, then you hear it echoed over and over, growing more faint as chickens further away repeat the call. Then in a slow moving wave it comes back closer to home.

Some religious group on the island likes to do early sunrise chanting. In the haze of early morning sleep, the sounds build bizarre dream images. For some reason they use a P.A. system and broadcast their chanting. Thanks. It makes me think of scenes from Apocalypse now. But chickens and chanters alone don't complete the rhetoric of threes.

This is why there are the mysterious whirling whistles. Think of that kid's toy that was basically a piece of hose that you swung around faster or slower to get different pitches of whistling. Now imagine twenty of them cut to different lengths, harmonizing with each other and circling overhead, spanning two or three houses. I was stumped and unable to sleep in a puzzled stupor trying to figure out what it was. The mystery was solved at daybreak when I saw the flock of birds circling and singing their strange constant cries.

Snorkeling, Gili Trawangan, Indonesia

We're in Gili Trawangan. It's part of a set of three tiny islands on the Northwest part of Lombok, Indonesia. We're on the largest of the three islands.

Yesterday, we scheduled a snorkeling trip/glass bottom boat tour that went around to all three islands. It costs us 7,000 rupiah, which is just about $7. I'm still amazed at how little it costs us to do these things. Anyways, the trip started on our island. The boat brought us to another part of our island where we did some snorkeling. The water was the clearest I've seen. We saw some colorful coral and all kinds of colorful fish.

Our next snorkeling stop was the middle island, Gili Meno. This time, the goal was to spot sea turtles. Since we were in a deeper part of the ocean, we were warned to stay close to our guide and to make sure our snorkeling equipment was on well. We mostly swam within view of the coral shelf. But sometimes, I would look towards the side furthest from the shore, and I'd see the shelf suddenly drop off. I wouldn't be able to see anything but dark water with no bottom in sight. It was right along the edge of these coral cliffs where we'd see the turtles. Our guide would swim down disturb the turtles slightly so it would move, and we'd be able to see the turtles more clearly when it swam away.

After, we headed towards the final island of the Gili chain called Gili Air. The attraction here was the giant clams. Our guides told us this would be the last snorkeling spot, and all of us snorkelers sat there without moving. We were pretty tired by the time we got to this spot. We begrudgingly got in the water after lots of commands to jump out of the boat and were taken to the two giant clams in the area. We watched our guide poke at the clams so that it would open and close its mouth. It was a bit anti climatic. They weren't too big. Eric and I both agreed that we'd seen bigger on the Discovery Channel and that Andrew Zimmern definitely ate larger ones on Bizarre Foods in Samoa. We joked that some local would harvest the clam for dinner one night, and all the tourist offices would have to take that attraction off of their snorkeling package.

It really was a great trip though. I learned how to swim as an adult and definitely haven't had much experience swimming in the ocean without some sort of flotation device. So, being able to navigate the water and see all the amazing sea life with just my fins and mask was a new and pretty cool experience.

Gili Trawangan, Indonesia

Gili Trawangan, Indonesia
We took a four hour boat ride from Padang Bai to the island of Gili Trawagnan, which is the furthest island in a small chain of three, known as the Gilis, off the north west coast of Lombok. For those of you mapping this out, Lombok is the next major island east of Bali.

We've been here for three nights so far, and yesterday we took an amazing snorkeling boat trip. It was aboard a glass bottom boat that toured the coasts of all three Gili islands and stopped at four prime snorkeling reefs. In some of the clearest bathwater I've experienced, we saw all kinds of tropical fish, sea turtles, giant clams, and beautiful coral reefs. It was the best seven dollars for five hours of entertainment I've spent in a while. The currents off the coasts of these isles are very strong and mostly the boat would dump us off in the water, then head down current to pick us up after we'd drifted in that direction. It made for some relaxing and effortless snorkeling, but was a little unnerving at the thought of what would happen without the boat as a safety net.