Just spent a week in Lombok recovering from the trials and tribulations of Vietnam, it was remarkably blissed out despite our nightmare journey here.Wanting to experience 'local travel', we opted for the boat experience rather than the widely recommended air experience. The difference between the two is about 20 quid and 4 hours - plus if you're not clued up, a huge argument with the Balinese scallywags who carry your bags onto the boat and then try to claim their 'service' costs 10 dollars per bag.By the time the argument was fully developed, my money was on Brian - he certainly leads the field in terms of people you wouldn't want to argue with when it comes to extorting large sums of money and he heroically fended off about 15 angry blokes who all, it appeared, now had had a hand in the ferrying of our wretched bags. They threatened to take our bags off the boat and back onto the shore (probably via the water and the odd oil spillage), we defended our position by counter-threatening to call the police and telling them not to touch our bags (me in my best Merchant Ivory haughty tone, laced with the odd snarl). Finally we paid them 2 dollars in total and they strutted off, cursing and spitting and generally swaggering so their mates wouldn't think they'd come off any the worse.'Buck you' they cried, forlornly, from the shore, 'buck you too' we called, once we were safely underway.

That wasn't the end of our tribulations though, we then had to endure 4 hours of travel, with little or no sight of the actual sea, as we were on the lower deck, unable to move up because of our huge bags, and because there was no shelter from the sun on the top deck. All around us people were smoking, shouting on their mobile phones and eating monkey nuts and throwing the shells on the floor to join the cigarette butts and general human effluence that missed the bins. The temperature was hot and very humid and most unpleasant - rather like travelling in a smelly, noisy sauna on a plastic seat for a few hours. Not surprisingly we opted to return to Bali by air.

Lombok itself is nice, but very different from Bali, Muslim, much poorer and generally far less developed. The weather was incredibly hot and humid and walking anywhere just ended up being a task of endurance - I would melt after 5 minutes walking uphill. I know, not much difference from home. We did however go out to the local town to experience the local Muslim festival, where a lot of goats and cattle where sacrificed at the mosque. We were invited by a local girl, Sarah, who worked in the spa at our hotel and became our new best friend. She was very sweet and took us to our house to meet her family and then to the mosque to watch the slaughtering. Fortunately it was all over by the time we got there and we could only witness the women doing all the hard work (as usual) of cutting up the various body parts and piling them up for distribution to the villagers later, while the men, having completed the onerous task of slitting the poor beasts' throats, lolled around smoking and chatting.

At the mosque we met one of the imams, a lovely man called Abdullah Bakry and he invited us back to his house for a chat. What's interesting is that no matter how well educated or even wealthy by local standards people are, they live very simply - there is no furniture, everyone just squats or sits on the floor. It's such a contrast to our Habitat-centred lives - here the paint is peeling, the cobwebs fluttering in the breeze and the faded pictures hanging haphazardly off the wall, but they seem to be simply uninterested in any form of home decoration. Indonesian Changing Rooms could clean up here.