The first 48 hours in Lombok have been odd to say the least. It actually started with me showing up for my flight and being told my reservation was cancelled due to time, which I don’t and did not understand, however there was another plane leaving 2 hours later so I jumped on it. When I arrived I was meet promptly by the hotel transport only for the driver to realize, as we were about to pull out of the parking lot, that lights did not work. It was deep into sunset and Lombok has virtually no street lights so headlights are a must. Using our phones as flashlights the driver attempted to fish under the dash to reconnect the misplaced wires. After 15 min or so, with no luck, we discovered the fog lights worked so we started our hour and half ride to the hotel. It doesn’t take an hour and a half because of distance but rather due to poor infrastructure and slow driving. Luckily 10 min into the drive, as he continued to fiddle with the wires, he miraculously got the lights to work. Arriving at the hotel at about 10pm, exhausted and starving I ate dinner while the local motorbike rental guy started in on me…they are relentless.
Before I left Bali Sholin, the driver that I befriended in Bali, got me on the phone with a surfer named Ari that lives on Gili air Island just off the coast of Lombok, to act as my guide. Ari becomes dead set on meeting and surfing with me while I’m in Lombok…I agree. So after numerous phones calls Ari arrives the next morning about 11am just before I’m about to bail and go for a surf. He’s a young, cool type surfer guy that totally plays the part; so I hop in his hired car, which was really my hired car, and we follow another guy I had meet that morning to a surf spot called Grupuk that’s 15min from the hotel. I know none of this seems too strange but the whole context and means by which it all came to pass is odd; it just kind of happened without any effort on my part.
Suddenly I had an entourage…Me, Ari and the driver and we’re cruising Lombok in search of surf. We ended up surfing Outside Grupuk in the morning and Inside Grupuk in the evening, although we checked two other spots for the afternoon session. Between surfs we stop for lunch, we all order and they let me pay for everything, not even thinking to ask or offering up cash. It was only an extra 6 dollars but at this point I’m kind of feeling like the sugar-daddy, not too sure what the deal is. After the 2nd surf we get back to the hotel and I do nothing waiting to see how this is going to pan out now that it’s dark. Ultimately I ended up paying for the driver and car for the day, which included: transport to 3 beaches, Ari’s ride from Gili, a 30min trip to an ATM and a stop at a grocery store for a total of $40 u.s., 2 extra lunches and dinners and a pack of smokes. I never felt manipulated but it was all barely on the right side of the line that marks where things get shady.
It becomes obvious at this point that Ari is not going back to Gili, as the driver drops us off at the hotel at 10:30pm, so he ends up sleeping in my board-bag on the floor of my hotel room with a pillow and my towel and sarong as a blanket. At about what I’m guessing was 5:30am Ari wakes me to go surf, I roll over and tell him to wait an hour till it’s light outside. After a quick breakfast, I paid for his, we both hop on my rented motorbike and head back to Grupuk for a surf, it wasn’t as good as the day before. So after catching a few waves and kind of being over it I decided to help a French girl, who was learning how to surf, catch a wave. One of the first things I teach her is the ‘turtle roll’; good thing I did. After a few failed but improving attempts to catch a wave we are paddling back out just as one of her girlfriends comes surfing in from the outside directly at us. I duck dive, as she turtle rolls just as her friend loses control on the wave and launches her board into the bottom of ‘my students’ board. That’s why I said it was lucky that she learned to turtle roll because otherwise the nose of her friends board would have ended up in her head, or some other body part. I mean I heard the boards collide, and I was a good 30 meters away by then. I’d like to think that my decision to be a surfing instructor prevented a potentially major accident but the fact of the matter is that if I would have never been involved those circumstances would have probably never occurred; none-the-less that’s the story.
My time with Ari, to this point-since he says he is coming back tomorrow-ended as abruptly as it began when he announced he was going back to Gili! What a strange, random and quit odd set of happenings…all in the first 48 hours of my time in Lombok. I can only guess what the next 4 days will bring.
