Once we had found a hotel in Senggigi we went for a walk along the beach. Lonely planet explains that the beaches here are the best any traveller will find so when we walked along the muddy looking sand we were a bit disappointed. The beach wasn't very clean and wasn't somewhere we would want to sun bathe. This is not the first time that the Lonely Planet books have painted a perfect picture of a dump.

We had a look round the rest of the town and found somewhere for a drink. There's really not much to Senggigi, many people just pass through as the boats come here from Balli, otherwise it makes a good base to go trekking or climb the volcano.

We decided to hire a car so we could explore a bit more of Lombok. The following day we drove towards the base of the big volcano and found a little hotel to have some lunch in. The food was great and one of the guys there wanted to take us on a trek around the paddy fields to a waterfall. We followed him through the rice fields where the scenery was beautiful, kids were shouting hello at us as we passed. We even passed some kids swimming in the trench of one of the paddy fields! We then headed down some steps (if you could call them steps) and walked a short way up a stream to a beautiful waterfall that was plunging down into the gauge we had walked up. It reminded us of something you'd find in the secret garden, it had only been found two years before and we had it completely to ourselves. The water was freezing cold but it was well worth it. On our trip back our guide explained that his neighbour in the village had three cows stolen the night before. The thieves had dug a huge hole under the fence and led the cows through it. The only way for him to get them back is to go and look in the other villages and get a group of his friends to go and steel them back, going alone would be death!

Once back in Senggigi we found a nice little restaurant that made some very good authentic food. We have now found out that the Rendang we loved in Malaysia is actually an Indonesian dish, and it's probably our favourite too.

The following day we went for another drive. We stopped off at a view point where you could see the Gille Isles, our next destination, before continuing for a couple of hours round the other side of the volcano.

After eight and a half months we have become a little lazy and didn't fancy the two day trek up the volcano so we visited another waterfall. There are two waterfalls here, one is only a 20 minute walk the other is a lot further and you need a guide. I'm sure you can guess which one we went to.

Unfortunately we didn't have our swimming shorts. There is big pool at the bottom and apparently to cure baldness you should stand under the waterfall for ten seconds, you would probably get a long term headache instead though.

We liked Lombok, a lot less touristy than we thought it would be. Next stop, the Gili's.........