Gili Air

It was fantastic to just relax in our lovely wee hut at Lucky's on Gili Air for the first couple of days - basically we were in no great hurry to do anything much. Those first couple of days were spent just walking around the tiny island itself (about 90 minutes to circumnavigate the whole island on foot), and popping into each of the 3 scuba-diving operators on the island.

All the operators on all 3 of the Gili islands have a price fixing thing going on, but on arriving at the 3rd of the operators on our island it turned out the owner was an Irish woman. After chatting to her for a bit, she offered us a 10% discount if we went with them (they do offer a 10% internet booking discount, but she gave it to us 'cos we were Irish!). Since the other 2 places didn't offer any discount, and all 3 were pretty much identical otherwise, we went with the Blue Marlin operation (and anyway, they had a lovely pool and a cool general hang-out area with hammocks and free coffee, and we could use their snorkeling gear whenever we wanted). They also offered to drop us off at either of the other two islands after a dive, which we used to check out the main Gili island of Trawangan, although I assume the other operators would have done the same.

Anyway, after picked a scuba operator, but not yet booking any dives, the next day we just got the island hopper boat across to Gili Meno to check it out. Again it's a very small island, and we walked right around it in a few hours, stopping off at various spots to swim or for Sarah to sunbath for a bit. It's labeled as the quietest of the 3 islands, and it certainly seemed to live up to that when we were there, but it did have some great stretches of beach. At 4pm we hopped back on the island hopper boat back to Gili Air, and booked our first scuba dive for 8:30am the following morning.