Having spent a night in Denpasar near Bali airport we moved on to the unremarkable port side town of Padangbai - a gateway to the Gili Islands which were next on our hitlist of beaches. Padangbai itself is only to be tolerated, yes there are a number of dive shops and decent restaurants but these are outnumbered 5 to 1 by the local touts.

This can be the local guys who sit on motorbikes outside the only ATM in town which they know fine well is always broken and therefore charge a big ticket price for a lift into the nearest town but the main sales focus is usually a boat trip for your onward connection. There are 3 main choices - the fast boat, the medium boat and the slow boat. That said there is actually only one genuine fast boat and the slow boat looks a little like a floating, rusty skip. For theses reasons along with our British upbringing, we sat on the fence and decided on the middle option.

Once on the boat it turned out that half the passengers believed themselves to be on the fast boat, which at between twice and three times the price had meant a nice pocket load of cash for one or two of the padangbai touts. The boat itself gets into a small port called Lembar where you are stuffed in a minibus and carted off to the next port of Bangsal which is also notorious for its dodgy dealings.

While the trip had been fairly smooth, so as not to disappoint us it would seem, the bus pulled into a cafe before reaching the port where the local drivers (4 in total) along with a number of others in the cafe proceeded to play a game of good cop, bad cop whereby they claimed that it was not possible to get a return ticket once on the Gili Islands. As such, all tourists had to buy a return ticket from them or they would not be issued with the outgoing ticket. Pretty smart given you have no idea where you are and have nowhere to go...when the others on the bus became unsurprisingly angry at this turn of events then one or two of the locals would start losing their temper, claiming a lack of respect or, in one case, reminding the Dutch passengers of their country's unsuccessful attempt to invade Indonesia some 100 years ago and telling them that yes, they were threating them and yes, it was blackmail. This would be dealt with by an apologetic local who would 'ease' the situation. To avoid this hassle we quietly informed one of the locals that we were going to be working on the island and would be there for a number of months and as such didn't need a return ticket...this meant we were able to keep our heads down and wait for the dust to settle.

Finally on the boat and leaving the hassle of the mainland behind, we ran aground directly onto the white sandy beach of Gili Air and we were met by small blue carts pulled by little black ponies covered in tassles, bells and anything else that had been found washed up on the beach and was pretty. On first impressions we thought the boat must have somehow slipped through the Wardrobe taking us to Beachy-Narnia. Deciding to walk off the resentment from our earlier encounters we started making our way along a thin, winding dust track running along the edge of the beach. We later discovered that this was the island's equivalent of the M25 - the islands here do not permit any motorised traffic, only the the horse drawn cimodos and so nothing bigger is needed.

Gili Air is a million miles away from the hassle of the mainland. There are 3 Gili Isles in total with Gili Trawangan being the main resort and which is becoming slightly over-touristy, Gili Meno being the smallest and quietest and Gili Air being right in the middle (albeit not geographically). Traditionally, the Gili Islanders all lived on Gili Air with the other 2 islands reserved for their animals and so it is Gili Air that retains the traditional Indonesian village feel and you soon discover that nearly everyone you talk to is somehow related. The majority of locals sleep on small Berugas which are open raised platforms holding them off the beach rather than in houses. The Islands still have a 'Head' and it is his job to deal with any disputes and the islands have managed to avoid having a police presence so far. The water on the island comes from deep wells that absorb some of the salitness from the surrounding sea and so you soon become used to the constant taste of salt which you can only (nearly) escape by staying further inland.

With white sand beaches, good food (loads of fresh fish being barbequed over coconut husks right along the beach), turquoise water and a friendly village atmosphere we decided within a matter of days that we would like to spend more time here. We spoke with one of the local dive schools about training as Divemasters (which is one level off being a fully fledged Dive Instructor and allows you teach some courses and lead divers around dive sites) and negotiated ourselves a monthly rate for a brand new bungalow that had been built back off the beach in the middle of a field - so brand new that the for the first 3 days of our stay the roof was being finished off and we currently have another week to wait for a bed...

So far we are loving the laid back island life and the first few days of our dive training, very relaxed and the only minute stresses we have faced so far have been a very big green spider (which led to the destruction of a small plastic water scoop and not the spider), finding a good room rate, deciding which particular fish we fancy eating tonight and...finding ourselves woken up to the house shaking in the middle of an...

'EARTHQUAKE' ...I shouted at 7.30am just as I was waking up to find the house rocking from side to side. Expecting Eleanor to jump up screaming I first thought she must have been frozen with sheer terror while my manly survival instincts had already started forming a safe route out of danger for us both. As I shook her to her senses she told me to get lost because she was 'tired'...with visions of my last trip to the Natural History Museum and the simulated Tokyo earthquake I remembered that the Japanese quake had been preceeded by a little tremor just like the one I had just felt... I reminded Eleanor, I was expecting the colour to drain from her little (bright) red (shiny & sunburnt) face but again I was met with a 'please, shut up, I'm tired. Why dont you go and have a shower?'. I jumped out of bed. I got a skirt out for the sunblushed one so that as soon as she realised the the levity of the situation we could escape together. Turning around to try and coax her out of what was clearly a case of denial I saw that she was fast asleep again. I gave up. I stroppily stamped over to the shower not missing the opportunity to utter what could have been my potential last words:

'Well, when the house collapses on us both it'll be your fault...'

With all joking aside, thankfully it turned out that the tremor we had felt was actually the edge of an earthquake that had struck in Denpasar in Bali a couple of weeks before the Sumatra quake and while as strong caused little real damage. Even the small tremor felt quite powerful to me and it was a good reminder of how suddenly these things can just happen.

We are looking forward to settling down here for a while although we will be getting ourselves into a bit of a routine as we work on what is essentially an internship in the dive school. We have not had to think about working for a few months now but I think this may be a little different...