Doing nothing #4 Up at the crack of 930. We taxied into the Senggigi CBD to book our transport to backpacker Gili, get cash (no ATM on the islands) and buy some second hand books (hard times eh?). Mission accomplished, on the transfers and ATM, A-lo went back to the second hand book kiosk and beat the owner down to 60K (2 quid each - I still say we were ripped off but desperate measures…) for 2 good condition recent novels. What a backpacker eh? It wa...

Doing nothing #3 Up late. Cloudy so no point being too energetic about life. Went to Albertos for a late lunch. Despite being the only guests the marinated fish salad and pesto spaghetti were top notch and a welcome change from nasi goreng. Back at Qunci, installed on front lounger, the weather coming over from Bali looked ominous. The staff suddenly went into a frenzy of packing up outside, leaving us until the last possible minute. After an anticlimax of...

Doing nothing #2 Big decision of the day was booking the trip to the Gili Islands, a reputedly idyllic archipelago up the coast. We opted for a trip run by Harris - Annelise trusted his seaman ship because he claimed "I'm a surfer, I know the ocean". We installed ourselves at the Pool Villas loungers. Annelise wanted to sit on a lounger right by the sand and made me lie there by myself for 10 minutes to test whether the pestering from the Hawkers wa...

Doing nothing… We had set aside today to do very little….so following breakfast we installed ourselves on loungers by the pool and focused on achieving our objectives….The nearest pool was crowded (6 others) so decamped to the Pool Villas deck next door. By now we had sussed that the staff had been trained to say several English phrases perfectly. E.g. "How is your day?" and "How was lunch?" This was deceptive. We soon found that an...

Call to prayer woke me up in the early hours. I listened to the service remotely, puzzled at how a mosque with a 30.000W PA system could exist in the coconut trees and jungle across the road from Qunci. We lazed by the pool for an hour before deciding to investigate what was along the beach. Heading left was a deserted small hotel, followed by our sister resort. After a hundred meters of coconut trees was a resort of 2 huge private villas and some bungalows. A...