After Bali, we headed towards Bali abord a fast ferry that took us there for 2.5h. I immediately went outside knowing that I can get quite a bad seasickness from boats and I did well, except.. I got sunburnt which made me suffer for a few days quite badly 😀 But I didn’t get sick, while Rad, unfortunately, did, even though she took a pill.
Now it’s time for the WORST part of the trip for me – the Rinjani Mountain trek 😀 First, my 2 lessons learned..
- I am NOT made for hiking for a long time
- Never, ever, ever again go somewhere without doing research first (I kinda expected a “tiny” walk, but instead got.. a 9 (NINE!) hour hike in each direction with an on average 45% steepness angle and.. scorching sun of almost 40 degrees with NO SINGLE place to hide from the sun. AND with wrong shoes, bc i expected a tiny hike, i took “tiny” shoes, i.e. regular running type sneakers.. BIG, INSANELY big mistake. YOU MUST wear shoes for mountain hiking on RINJANI. Please wear proper shoes so you don’t end up falling 300 times on the way down like I did.
But there was something positive too:
- After this hike, I felt invincible 😀 I had to hike to an erupting volcano in Iceland a few months later. See https://travel.worldofinspiration.net/index.php/2023/08/06/litli-hrutur-volcano-eruption/ if you’re interested. Knowing it’d be 3+ hours i don’t know, maybe i would’ve given up, sounds like a lot, but after Rinjani I feel I can do anything and really.. I didn’t feel the hike, it was great.
Ok, now to the story..
The Stanley Villa’s (unpleasant) surprises
<< (not my photo)
So the first thing we did when we arrived on Lombok island, was, of course, to check in, nothing special there. We stayed at the Stanley villa, which looks gorgeous, however, it was terrible because the villas are basically open from everywhere – the roof is not closed on purpose and you get many.. let’s say, unwanted guests at night. Like this tokay lizard which is very cute and super funny to hear around you, however, trust me, it’s NO FUN seeing it on the wall in front of you at 5 AM, then it starts running in your direction super. SUPER fast. Goooosh, got my heart out really. Almost got a heart attack that particular morning. Ofc, you get many mosquitoes as well, so I felt quite nice having my mosquito net., which looked ridiculous and I knew it would probably rip off if the tokay went on top of it but luckily that didn’t happen.
You can see that it’s quite big – up to 40cm in length. Here’s how it sounds: https://youtu.be/-U1r-Cgmdvg?si=t4nK1FaxxKsxpaf1&t=12. Not only that, but at Stanley, the owner, Stanley.. obviously 😀 had a lot of caged birds at the entrance. This seems to be very popular in Indonesia and I can’t disapprove of more. Indonesia is one of the biggest exporters of wild birds along with the Philippines and it breaks my heart when i see beautiful birds in tiny cages where they cannot spread their wings, fly or escape when they’re scared. And at Stanley they WERE scared.. from the constant flow of people with suitcases, from people getting too close, you see the bird backs away but can’t really go anywhere. It’s soo horrendous.. Especially when i hear a bird song, open my BirdNet app super happy that I will record a new bird in my collection (which i accidentally deleted with factory resetting the phone, but that’s another topic), and then.. realize the sound comes from a cage I haven’t noticed.. So this was the main reason i had to leave a bad review for Stanley, i could live with the geckos and the tiny lizards or with the mosquitos, or with the constant prayers from the nearby mosque (during almost the whole day AND night), but with the animal cruelty not.. no compromise there, sorry..
Right, back to the story. Sooo we’ve tested the pool at Stanley’s and it was ok, the place really looked awesome but this problem with the birds in cages.. anyway, we also asked the hotel staff if they knew a tour guide who could take us around and organize everything for us. So they called our guide, Wan, Ridwan.
The Rinjani Mountain trek
So we first went to the mountain trek. We booked this trek at one of the tourist agencies right after you get off the ferry in Lombok. We chose the “2 days-1 night” option, but they didn’t tell us a lot more than showing us the route on a map which didn’t really reveal a lot of information at all. They told us to bring a hat, and each of us would have 3L of water per day out of which we keep 1.5L in our bags and the rest goes with the porters who will come with us. We had to be at a certain location (a hotel restaurant) at 7 AM where we’d meet more people we would go together with. We met there a Swiss girl and an American guy, both of whom had experience hiking, unlike us. They drove us for about an hour on the back of a truck, like a bag of potatoes 😀 Brought us to a medical center where they took down our blood pressure and checked us and gave us the green light to go for the trek. Surprisingly, they let us go, and everything seemed normal, however, I had no idea what was coming my way..
We had 3 porters with us and one guide. I was amazed at the strength of these boys, because yes, they were like 20-year-old boys, so skinny but very strong, they had to bring each a wooden or a bamboo stick and weight of more than 30kg for each, carrying tents, gas stoves, food, water, sleeping bags etc for everyone. AND they were walking on.. wait for it.. FLIP-FLOPS! Flip-flops!! On the vulcanic ash paths that were so difficult to walk with shoes.. let alone flip-flops.. real heroes, and very underpaid.. The hike started off easy – not steep or just a little in some places and through a forest. I thought to myself “that’s perfect, i can do 9h like that, no problem”, but this was only the start of it. It went bad pretty quickly. The views were really stunning, however by noon I was soo tired already and we still had 6h of the hike ahead of us. We stopped at POS II I think, where we had lunch. The guys were cooking for us and we got some rice, some noodles, eggs and fresh fruit. It was amazing except.. everything was spicy and I was almost crying while eating. I asked them next time not to be spicy because i couldn’t eat it and i’d starve 😀 they promised to not be spicy but.. well.. it was.. apparently in Asia when you say “not spicy” it means a bit spicy for them which is VERY bad for you.. so it’s never 0 on the scale of “spiciness” 😀 We then continued, we were not even at POS III, the worst part starts after POS III, as we were already dead, like barely survived. Radena was walking with an umbrella which meant one of her hands was occupied and to keep good balance when walking you really need to keep both your hands free. I had a hat, but that hat was of these big ones, lady-like hats, definitely not the type for hiking, but it did help tremendously nonetheless. However the volcanic ashes were sooo bad, you had to put something on your mouth and i used a top i had prepared for changing my current t-shirt with. Well.. still felt as if i’ve swallowed a whole cup of dust, such a terrible feeling and if you spit, you’d throw dust out. This and the high temperatures and no shadow and suddenly as i would take 5 steps, i had to stop and wait for 5min to catch my breath. And it also felt like i’d vomit and felt dizzy and felt really, really bad, also my head was pulsing from pain. I later figured out that i had probably had a sunstroke. Never felt like this before, i really felt sooo bad. We were the last of everyone and the guide had to stay with us. The other 2 guys from our group had arrived at least 1, probably 2h before us even. We were the last of the last.. almost. We arrived around 6pm and they showed us where our tent was. We took a break but it was already getting suuuper cold and we had to have dinner outside. We had dinner, and enjoyed the view for a bit, it was sunset time. One of the biggest issues there is that there are no toilets, which is really sad, because the forests are gorgeous but.. full of human waste everywhere, and tissues and everything.
We had to be quick with dinner and go to sleep because we were only at the base camp.. we were YET to trek to the top of the mountain. We were supposed to wake up at 2 AM and start the trek to be on the top by 6 when the sunrise was supposed to begin. We weren’t sure that we could make it and especially because they said this is really the worst part of it all. We did wake up and prepared, it was sooooo freezing. Radena didn’t want to go, but she agreed to join me. We started but were so slow and the terrain became really impossible even at the beginning. First were two hills we had to go up on and then was the path to the top which was basically only ash and gravel. You take one step forward, and two steps backward. And the path is so narrow and you had to climb on pitch black with a headlight. We reached a metal ladder that was put between two big rocks, crossed that and then reached another rock we had to climb over but there was also lots of sand and some sort of net on top of that, we had to climb there but we weren’t sure we’d make it down afterwards and so we decided to give up there. So when the guide showed up asking what’s going on, we told him to continue without us and that we’d go back. He had already lost a lot of time bc of us and the other 2 guys were waay ahead, so he had to catch up with them. We started to go back, but at some point, we couldn’t recognize where we were and where we were supposed to go. We tried not to panick, but we really couldn’t recognize the place, because on the way up we weren’t looking around. So after 5 min we managed to find our way to the right path and went back down to the tents. While we were still going up a guy was coming down who was really pissed. We tried to tell him something but he just went past us and said nothing back. Later on we were told by the American guy that they met this dude and he was swearing and pissed because he couldn’t make the hike. We went back to the tent and it was really amazing to see all these tiny little dots of light going on the edge of the paths leading to the top. You could not see the mountain but could see the tiny dots all over the ridge. When the guys from our group came back, they said that so many people gave up and just stood on the ridge, freezing on the path of the strong, cold wind. Many of them gave up and came back. The Swiss girl cried when she reached the top and the American guy was so pissed, he made it, but he couldn’t stop swearing “Като каруцар”, like we say in Bulgarian (like a… uhm.. carriage driver or so :D). So it was difficult even for them. The guy has booked the “2 nights-3 days” experience, but just said “f**k it, I’m going down”, after he saw the mountain he was supposed to climb for that day 😀 I think that says enough 😀
We went back to sleep until about 8 AM when the people were coming back from the top. We had to leave at about 9 so we could be back by 6 PM with a lunch break again at POS I or POS II, can’t remember. However on the way down, contrary to what I thought, was very hard, because I my shoe base was VERY flat and on the big stones there was ash and on top of it tiny gravel, this was a recipe for falling, because you step on the gravel, it slides down the big rock and you end up on the ground. At some point, maybe around fall number 10 or so, my legs were trembling and i was barely walking, so much so, that our tour guide felt bad about me and took my backpack on the way down, so he was climbing down with two backpacks.. :/ I was really thankful but also felt very guilty. Finally, at POS I he thought I’m good enough to take my backpack back. We gave these guys big tips because they did soo much for us. This really made us closer and at the end the goodbye was a bit difficult, to be honest. Especially with our guide. I also gifted my bag to one of the porters who was goofing around on the truck on the way back by putting it on. So I gave it to him (it was also a bit dirty from the ash). You can see how dirty my hands were in the photo below with the watermelon. My face was the same, my body too, clothes, shoes.. everything. It’s kind of bringing the trauma back as i’m writing this 😀 But i’m at least finally ready to talk about it, when it finished, I swore that.. NEVER AGAIN, and i plan to follow this promise. But I also didn’t want to talk about it in any way, but now it feels ok, half a year later. So that was about Rinjani 🙂 One of the most memorable, albeit, not the best, experiences of the whole trip.
The Lombok Secret Gilis, turtles and more..
Ridwan took us to explore different locations like a cute village called Tetebatu where there was a young boy whose dream was to work on a cruise ship one day and he was practicing his English with us, took us around a real rural experience across his village, showed us the prettiest rice fields i’ve seen, much much better than the super famous ones in Bali, because these were much more natural, not crowded and so pretty, surrounded by red plants giving the landscape an amazing accent among all the greenery. We saw the trees for all sorts of things we’re used to in our daily life such as cashews, mango, coffee and so many more, it was so interesting to see where many of the things we consume but never really think much of it, come from.
We went to a secret waterfall.. didn’t seem to be that secret but it was quite nice. I didn’t put mt swimsuit on though, a bit sad, but we went into the water anyway – at least until the water level reached a little above our knees, it was enough to freshen up a but from the heat. We also saw people collecting rice, it was amazing to see how each of these people had his own task and would only do that task, either putting the rice stalks together, or beating the hell out of it, was very interesting to watch and film this. One thing you’d notice there, is that all the cats have their tails cut. When you ask the locals why, they will explain to you that this by cutting off the tail of the female cats, it makes them less attractive to male cats and thus, reduces their population 😀 I will leave the conclusion of that statement to you 😀
Probably one of the best things was setting a turtle free from the Turtle Conservation Center on Gili Nanggu. I’ve described it here http://travel.worldofinspiration.net/index.php/2024/01/07/snorkeling-secret-gilis-lombok-around-flores/
