Earliest morning
This may be the earliest I’ve ever had to get up so far. I was catching a bus to the port. From there, I’d catch a boat which would take me to Lombok today, and I’d be doing it alone. Mat would be travelling by himself for a couple of weeks while I was visiting my friend in Lombok. I had to wake up at 4:30am which was tough. This task required me to be extra quiet to not wake anyone else up. When I was ready to leave, I ordered a taxi and took it to the station where the bus would be leaving from. I say station, it was a shop basically.
It turned out that the bus shop was actually closed, but there was a 7/11 next door. So I went next door for a bit of breakfast and to wait until the bus shop opened. At around 5:30am the bus shop opened and I was able to collect my ticket, which I had originally got from 12go.asia. At around 6:30am, the minibus rolled up outside of the shop and picked me up, I was the only one on the bus. The journey to Padangbai, which was the port, was around 2 hours long, and I arrived at 8:45am. We had only picked one other person up, as well as stopping off at someone’s house for a break.
At the port
Once I actually reached the port, I went to the office and bought my ticket for around 50k rupiah. The boat from Bali to Lombok takes 4 or 5 hours, so I decided to get some sleep, especially since I was up so early. It wasn’t the comfiest seating, but I managed to get a good few hours of sleep. Quite a few of the other passengers were throwing up, which I felt sorry for. I guess they’re not the seafaring kind of souls. At around 1pm, the boat reached the island of Lombok, at the port of Lembar.
My friend Elva was meeting me here, so I disembarked the boat and walked a little way away from the port. She was running a little late, so I had to sit around and wait in the baking heat for a while. I kept my eye out, watching the entrance to the area. But out of nowhere, I heard someone calling my name. It turned out it was Ekutt, my friend’s cousin, she was followed by Elva, my friend. We’d been looking forward to meeting for a while, so it was really nice to finally meet each other. After we’d finished introductions, I hopped onto Elva’s scooter, she got on the back, and we returned to Mataram, the main city of Lombok.
Settling in
We went to my hotel, where I’d be staying for the duration of my visit, to check in. The hotel was pretty cheap, and it was called the Just-In Hotel, one of the OYO hotels that I’d seen scattered across Asia. It was fairly basic, but the rooms were clean enough and had aircon which was essential. Once I had settled in, and had chilled for a bit with Elva, we went out to get some longer shorts for me. In Muslim culture, it’s frowned upon to show your knees and upwards. It didn’t take too long before I found some large shorts that went beyond my knees, but also far beyond my waist size.
After we were sorted with shorts, we visited the Mataram Epicentrum, a large shopping centre that I’d be visiting quite often. To begin with, we walked around the shops for some time, before Elva had to pray. I thought it was pretty nifty that shopping centres, restaurants, etc. had prayer rooms, quite convenient. Once she returned, we went to a great ice cream shop (Paris Castle Ice Cream) which allowed you to have wicked mixes of chocolates and flavours, for a low price too. We got the large one and shared it, though I had most of it to be fair. After spending a few hours here, we left on the scooter and hung out at the hotel again. We ended up chatting for a few hours before it got late and she went home.
