We woke up at 4am to leave the hotel by 4:30am, to head to the airport. We had arranged with the hotel for an airport transfer. It took about 1 hour to get to the airport. They do check to make sure you have a ticket as you enter the airport, so make sure you have a print out of your ticket or print the check in confirmation. Security was pretty quick and painless and we made it through to the gate by 5:30am. We had a canned coffee at the gate and waited to board our flight at about 7:30am. The plane was a very small twin prop plane and we walked from the boarding gate and onto the plane across the tarmac. Our flight left a bit late, 7:40am and it took off on what would be the shortest flight of my life. After take off I noticed you could see one of the big volcanoes in the near distance. Next we flew over Nusa Penida and many fishing boats and coral areas. Then as we landed over Lombok I saw hundreds of rice fields as reflective as glass against the sun. We landed after 20 minutes of total flight time, arriving at the arrivals gate by 8:20 am. I wasn’t able to connect to the airport wifi to contact our driver on Whatsapp, so Jives did. Our driver was outside with a sign with our name on it. Another driver aggressively tried to get us to go with him, some of the most aggressive sales I have ever seen (and we had just been in Egypt). Our driver directed us to his car and we set off. The ride was very different from the ride into Ubud, the roads were empty but wide. We drove past about 500 police cars at some sort of police training before heading into the back roads of Lombok. We drove through a “bigtown” with a few shops before climbing many near vertical hills and then going through mud roads with chickens. At one point I was convinced our car was going to tip backwards and roll down the hill. There is no way we could rent a scooter here. We arrived at Blue Monkey Retreat and checked in, which consisted of writing my email address on a sheet and signing it.The guy said he would check to see if our room was ready. We waited, overlooking the entire bay of Areguling. Eventually he came back to say that our room was ready and we went to drop off our stuff. The room was simple and perfect, with a view of the entire waterfront from the two chairs on our front porch. We sat on our front chairs and had a coffee. It did not occur to me that the tap water would be salt water, so we had a VERY salty coffee. The place provides water in reusable water bottles, which is really nice and you can get the bottles refilled as much as you like. After sitting for a few hours, we went for a walk to find food. We went to a place just down the road called Grass Cafe. The cafe was outdoors on a built up portion of someone’s house. Jives had the Goreg (veggies and sauce with rice) and I had a fried noodle dish. We both had papaya juice. We made a dog friend who followed us for quite a time, but he had blood coming from somewhere and kept leaving pools of it all over (especially our porch). Poor little guy.
Later on we ventured down to the beach with our swim gear. The walk down to the beach was interesting, we said hi to many happy children and encountered so many chickens, goats and even a group of cows. Once at the beach it was actually really fine pebbles and not sand. We explored the beach front and walked to the end of the beach where we decided to go for a swim. The water was so warm and there were lots of rocks and coral. I wish I had brought my snorkel down. It suddenly looked like rain so we hurried back up to our hotel, coming across the same cows crossing the road ( a cow traffic jam).
Later we ventured back to the beach after the rain and explored some more as the tide went out (around 5pm).
Continued at.... bumblingtourist.com/
0:00-0:10 - Intro
00:10- Last night in Ubud Bali Indonesia street food
1:18- Flying to Lombok Indonesia from Ubud Bali Indonesia
4:07- Arriving in Lombok Indonesia and driving to Areguling beach
4:52- Amazing accomodation in Lombok Indonesia Blue Monkey Retreat
7:48- Walking in a tiny Village in Lombok Indonesia off the beaten tourist path
14:53- Swimming in the Pacific Ocean Lombok Indonesia
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