The flight to Lombok was 20 mins. 20 mins. Like they give safety instructions and the pilot takes off, the seat belt signs are switched off. And in 10 mins, it's switched back on and pilot says "cabin crew prepare for landing". Even in that short duration, I managed to sleep. I'm like that sometimes. If I get my timing right, I will doze off when the airplane takes off and open my eyes exactly when the wheels touch the tarmac. We landed at Lombok, and were pretty surprised to find a reasonably OK airport. And guess what we found! oh no, wait before that, I forgot to talk about the food Akshay picked up at the Bali airport that we sat on the floor of the airport and ate while waiting for the gates to open :
.jpg)
Dried Mango
Dried mango and crackers. We literally sat on the floor eating this and drinking our coffee. People must have stared at us like we were mad also. I also learnt that snacks that you eat while drinking are called chakhna. My (north) Indian trivia from the trip. Anyhow, back to my excitement on arriving in the Lombok airport. While we waited for our ten thousand bags to arrive, we spotted a chakhna shop and decided to pick up, stuff for our nights. Ok nights sounds shady no? humne hamari raaton ke liye samaan uthana ka faisla kiya. :| haha. We bought a few things from there and then Akshay comes running saying he has discovered a bakery at the other side that looks very nice and that people are queuing up for. We'd sent him to figure out booking a cab from Lombok To Mentigi, but obviously, he had to share his discovery with us, and food was an obvious priority. So we went to see what the fuss was about.
Roti O.(M.G)
This is THE MOST AWESOME THING WE ATE IN OUR TRIP. Ok, almost, I mean after the pork ribs maybe, or even the banana smoothie from Earth Cafe for me, ok but you get it, it was delicious. It was this bun kind of thing, that had a crispy top and you could feel the crisp when you bit into it, and the center was buttery and gooey-ish with a coffee flavour. You had to eat it hot. So we bought 5 first, one for each of us, just to see what it was. And when we opened it and ate it we made these "umm" sounds with closed eyes. There were two people standing next to us, near the luggage belt and they looked at us and smiled and said "good no!", both the guys had a piece of roti-o in their hands. So, we decided to go get more for our ride to Mentigi. Akshay with his expert spanish negotiation skills, got us a cab for a good rate and we set out to Mentigi. Google Maps said it wil take us 1.5 hours and that is what Britta, our villa owner told us as well. But it took us longer. Waaaaaay longer. But it was an interesting cab ride. We realised that Indian movies, music and TV Serials (or rather only the Mahabharata and Ramayana) are very very very popular. And they copied tunes from indian songs and sang their own songs, or sometimes sang the same song with regional singers. So we entertained ourselves and our cab driver for a bit. And then we all got silent and enjoyed our Roti-Os for a while and then we launched into a long discussion about relationships. And what do people look for in an ideal partner, why men from the merchant navy sometimes are colored in a certain way, whether the singles in the group will ever find someone. Etc Etc Etc. We had told the driver to stop at a liquor store so we can pick up some beer. We stopped at a town (Sengigi) and picked up a few cans, Stuti, me and Uttesh picked up some meat from a meat store (salami, sausages types) and we set out again. The drive now had started to resemble the Shimla drive, we were climbing and dwscending, almost like ghats. We could hear the ocean and it's waves. Would've been a beautiful drive in the morning. But quite frankly, we were a little scared then. It was dark, the driver (or us) didn't exactly know where the dome villas in Mentigi was and all we had was Birtta's phone number.
Fortunately, Stuti, spotted this sign :
and we got the car to stop and turned into the driveway and drove up that steep cemented path/road, like literally a hill. That climb was going to break our backs in the next three days, but anyhow, we had finally arrived. We continued driving until the car could go no further. And saw nothing in the darkness. And then we saw some stairs going up, so Sim, Uttesh and me climbed those stairs to go find someone. We could see the domes to our right. We arrived at another road, and saw someone, I tried talking to him, but we didn't understand each other. And then, in that darkness, we finally found Britta. And she showed us to the villa, called someone on the phone and asked him to come up, because she was still in her sarong, and she sent this other guy to go get our cab up through the other road route that would lead up to the villa's entrance.
Aziz came up and introduced himself. He was the manager of the villa and showed us around while Akshay and Stuti joined us after the cab was up. And Simran was shrieking throughout, because, there were cats (kittens actually) running around all over. And until then, none of us knew that Sim was petrified of cats! And we've known her for some 11 years! Aziz tried calming her down, but she was literally shrieking. Uttesh and I couldn't help but laugh. We had to constantly shoo the cats away for Sim (and our) mental sanity.
The villa looked beautiful, but eerie. Because it was so quiet and dark and like we say in Hindi :sun-saan. The place was huge and could easily accommodate 10 people, like literally, 10people. There were 4 domes, 5 actually. One was the living room, the other was our kitchen, the other two were two bedrooms each and the last one was an additional washroom. There was an outdoor flower shower and loads and loads and loads of places to lounge. The bedrooms went down one storey, and the opened up to a fantastic view.
This is a photosphere, 360degree view of the place :)
This is living area dome. The Bougainvillea were beautiful and matched the pink and white decor of the living room.
This is the view from the entrance to the two bedrooms. Sigh.
The huge sofa-bed in the full-of-pink living room
This is an aerial view of the place
The kitchen was really well stocked with bread and eggs and basic necessities. Good enough for our three days. We discussed diving details with Aziz and he said he will meet us the next morning to give us detailed info on what all we could do in Lombok and the Gilis. And then he asked us what we were doing for dinner. And that Honey (who is the guy we met earlier and is also the security guard of the place) would get us packed food from a near-by thella type of place and he said we can get 5 plates of nasi campur. We thanked him and agreed and decided to explore the place on our own and settle down after Aziz had left. The folks decided to chill while i took a shower, which itself needed extreme courage. Because quite frankly the place was prettttty eerie. I managed to survive the shower and join the group. The dinner had arrived, and everyone was drinking and munching on the snacks we'd picked up. There was a huge stereo in the villa and we decided to play music from Stuti and Uttesh's phone. Music that was loud enough to keep Honey up, just in case he qas being lazy and slept off. And also loud enough for the tiny Mentigi town we were in.
well, this is, umm, a nicer version of the whole pic. Only included because the rest of the group will thrash me again for only talking about them and not about me. sorry Uttesh. I cropped as much as I could
We settled down in the living room, with our plates, & decided to attack the food...
After a while we decided to move to the Living area and start dinner. Now, the food. Was insanely spicy, I loved it, but the others had a tough time. It was rice, with some red fiery chicken curry thing, then dried meat and fish, and some jackfruit fry and one more vegetable thing. The chicken curry was the spicy-est and my chicken (or everyones chicken) had skin on it, and I don't like skin-walla chicken. I loved the dish otherwise. Like really loved it. And then when everyone else couldn't take the spice anymore... we realised there is curd/yogurt in the fridge and added curd to the rice and ate in full south indian style. The curd made everything more tastier. After dinner we played even more music, there was a small drum in the room, that we used with the songs via the huge speaker. And then we decided to dance....Hindi ishtyle. We danced, drank, danced, drank, danced in a circle and drank more.
Proof of madness
The Baileys from the plastic bottle got over. The guys (and Simran) had beer i think, because they had given away their beloved Myers rum to Widi in Seminyak. There was just a little bit of Old Monk. Stuti & I had wine (which you can see in the above picture). Oh, Simran and Akshay performed "Saturday Saturday" from Humpty Sharma Ki Dulhania in Lamboake (!)for us. I can't seem to upload the file here for some reason. In some way, Thank God, it's not uploading. Haha.
After some more randomness, we decided to call it a night. We had to meet Aziz at 9 am the next day. Now how to get to our rooms and sleep? We contemplated sleeping together because we were so scared, but eventually go the guts to go to our rooms. Akshay had Stuti ( ;) ) and we (sim & me) had Uttesh. Sim and me were sleeping downstairs and Uttesh was sleeping in this other bed type of thing upstairs. Simran was finally relieved because Aziz had carried the two kittens away with him. It was still a little spooky, because it was really windy and the doors and windows everywhere kept banging here and there. There was a portable AC in the rooms and there were standing fans. That cooled the otherwise very hot domes.
Did I saw we all went to sleep? Uh huh. I'll stop right there. Akshay, Stuti and I went to sleep. Sim and Uttesh, on the other hand, decided to explore the spookiness of the hill we were on. And more. So these two, were well, drunk, on life and spirits, and were already talking about going 'down to the beach'. the Mentigi Dome villas had their own beach, Aziz told us and these two night riders wanted to check in out at 12 am in the morning/night. That is the moment, the three of us said goodnight to them I think.
Should've realised when this picture was taken, that it was going to be an epic night
I prayed that night, because I had to sleep alone in a big dome. While Sim was roaming around the beaches of Mentigi. Anyhow, i didn't believe their we will go to the beach story and thought they are only talking nonsense. But well, knowing them, very well, Stuti very correctly said "Simran will go and poor Uttesh will have to go behind her". Correct only. Except that 'poor uttesh' really wanted to go as well. Now the rest of what i say here, is completely based on hearsay. They went all the way down to the beach it seems, along with some beers, and then sat on a boat, and then realised that it was freshly painted. And so they decided to go and continue their fun on another boat. In this entire episode, the guard at the beach saw them and came looking for them with a torch, so they hid inside their boat while he went about searching. They also then climbed to the front of the boat and sat and watched the beautiful moon from the deck, with Bintang beers in their hand. When they had had their fill, they decided to come back to the villa. Except that the villa was on the top of a very steep hill. Now how to climb?
Scene for reference only. Sim and uttesh have other bollywood characters associated with them, which I shall elaborate later.
Remember the above scene from Kal Ho Na Ho (how can I not bring in a Shah reference no?), where Saif and Preity are drunk. Now imagine Sim being Preity and Saif being Uttesh and no one is Shahrukh. So these two drunk people are trying to climb a very steep hill. With each other for company. they say, after a point, Uttesh had to push Simran from behind to move her along the road. Somehow they made it back. And did some other random nonsense around the domes.
So the bedroom domes have an open bathroom system, where, well, there are no doors. But there is a LARGE window, like this hoe type thing you can see below. Now a well-grown, adult human being can easily, easily enter through this window, or hole, or whatever you choose to call it. And these two decided to enter the bedroom using this hole. Now, I must have been damn tired and completely out, to have not heard any of this commotion. But it happened for sure it seems. All I remember hearing was footsteps running up and down the stairs within the bedroom, but I must have been very sleepy to not even open my eyes to see what's happening.
So anyway, they reached the villa, safe and sound. And finally slept. This was some 3 am in the morning. And they wake me up at 7 AM to see this view :
Yes, we woke up to this view for three days while we lived here. Now burn ya'll :D
Comments
Post a Comment