After our sea voyage from Flores to Lombok (read about it in our post from Labuan Bajo) we arrived by bus to Senggigi on the western shore of the island. As usual, we had made reservations, this time in a place called Indah Homestay that had its cheapest rooms going for 150'000 IDR per night. The owner (a Dutch woman) had contacted us by email, giving us directions which were of great help since the place could only be found by walking a narrow corridor, followed by an alley or two with more than a few turns. There were signs painted on the walls, but someone had been painting over the arrows to make them point to the opposite direction…

We located the place eventually and even found the owner to show us to our room. We were late in arriving, but we had informed them about that beforehand. The room was small, the bed covered about half of it and the attached bathroom supported a squat toilet. We have nothing against squat toilets. As a rule… This one was no good however, the bowl was so shallow that you could easily suffer from splash backs with your number ones and according to the note on the table you shouldn't put toilet paper in it after your #2's. Another charm of the Asian toilets, and fine if you are prepared for it. There is a scoop system that's supported in most places. This place supported the other way though, the way of the little trashcan… That again would be OK if they would come and empty out the trashcan at least once a day! They didn't. The bathroom reeked and not just of the soiled paper. Lacking a sink means using the shower for washing your hands, which means that the floor is constantly wet. With the tiling on the floor creaking on every step one can just imagine how much mold there is caking underneath… Also, they had the slowest wifi we've encountered over almost three months in Asia.

It wasn't all bad though, the yard area was nice and the owner was friendly. And the included breakfast was great, we chose toast and fried eggs over pancakes, they came with butter, jam, chocolate spread and a fruit plate. They also had a number of other services available, we used their 15'000 IDR/kg laundry service and would have ordered food out of their kitchen too, had it been available. Most importantly, we took up on their offer of transport to Gili Air. They charged 75'000 IDR per person for any of the three Gilis, whereas neighboring Perama Tours would have asked 90'000 or 150'000 depending on the type of transport.

Other than organizing the next jump of our island hopping adventure in Indonesia, we didn't do much over our two night stay in Senggigi. We did go to the beach once and walked for quite a bit along it to find the best spot for our hammocks to be just in front of the alleyway leading to Indah Homestay. The beach was long and abandoned for the most part, save for a few locals fishing in waist deep water. There were a few decent 7 Eleven-type stores, mainly Indomart and Alfamarket. I wouldn't go as far as judging this to be a boring place to stay for longer periods of time since we didn't stay for very long, but the first impression of Senggigi was that of a transport port, a place to hop on or off a boat and to move on quite hastily…

That's pretty much what we did, after arriving late on March 27th we took off early on the 29th. That left us with just one day in Senggigi to do some laundry and stuff. So why make a post from there? Because I like the map below to show the route we've taken and also because when this bit here was included in my text from Gili Air, it turned out to be too long!