@pfooti · 2025-07-24 · travel

July 21st and 22nd: Lombok

I’m going to combine two days wroth of posts here, because I’m a little short on photos from both. This is mostly a good thing; I forgot to take a lot of pictures because I was having a really good day.

On Monday, we snorkeled. It was a whole-day excursion; the boat picked us up on the beach at the resort and we boated around the three Gili islands. I was a little disappointed to find out that the other two aren’t Gili Fire and Gili Earth, but there’s definitely a Gili Air. No octopi this time, but we fed turtles. The guide picked some seagrass and we drifted close to the turtles as they were munching and held out an offering. No fingers were lost. It was pretty great. Besides being longer, it was similar to our earlier snorkeling outing; we were dropped off, floated in the current and looked at stuff, and then hopped back onto the boat to reposition and relax.

This is from Tuesday morning. The hotel staff did a lot of really clever stuff with our towels and a lot of flowers. There were fresh flowers used everywhere as decoration.

There were also a lot of little sharks. Apparently blacktip reef sharks, when juvenile (maybe 2 feet long?) will school in shallow water, and that’s precisely what they did. Overall: it was great. We spent the rest of the day in the same state we spent most of our time in Lombok: chill. The afternoons were hot and humid, so maybe we’d head back to the room (which was constantly getting little flower arrangements) to be in the AC for a while, or maybe if it was breezy, down to the beach. There’s tea at four (little snacks, plus hot and cold drinks), then more relaxation and book-reading, then dinner, more chill, maybe write a blog post, and bed. Rinse, repeat.

Stand-up paddleboarding is a lot harder with these semi-inflatable boards. They’ve got nearly no moment of inertia, so while I could balance okay laterally, the board shook a lot forward-backwards. I never made it upright, but I also didn’t fall in.

I have not been on many vacations that are as self-contained as our time at Tugu Lombok. Everything you might want to do (cooking class, flower arranging, snorkeling, spa) is right there at the resort; no need to leave. I have been trying to hold to a “no repeats” meal ordering plan, where I never order the same thing twice at any given hotel, and the restaurant here didn’t make that difficult. I didn’t feel an urge to go find another restaurant off-resort. I mean, we could have gotten off the snorkel boat on Gili Air and walked around there for a bit, but we didn’t. It’s strange to be so self contained. On the other hand: everyone knew our name. Like “hello, Mr. Eric!” when we show up for breakfast. A side-effect of being so self contained is, you’ve got the same hotel staff all the time.

The chairs were too heavy for us to pull in and out ourselves. The flowers and plant arrangements are all cut and folded palm leaves.

Tuesday was a Rijsttafel dinner. This is kind of a Dutch Colonial thing (the Dutch held Indonesia as a colony until 1945) where you get a whole lot of different kinds of food on a big table, kind of like a multi-course tasting menu. The table in question was carried up to us, but didn’t actually fit on this table, so stuff just got served direct. It was kind of funny- there was a soup course, an appetizer (a chicken pastry thing), and then there were ten dishes all at once. Then dessert. It was overwhelming, but pretty amazing.

They do this thing where they paint leaves with the name of the dish, or with a “have a nice dinner” message (left of photo).

So, all told, we had:

Ikan Acar Kuning (fish stew with turmeric cucumbers)
Perkedel Lombok (a kind of fritter or croquette served in a big pepper)
Urapan Putih (pickled veggies with coconut)
Serundeng Daging (a rendang-like beef stew)
Tum Ayam Rinjani (chicken with turmeric sauce cooked in a banana leaf)
Udang Bumbu Rujak (prawn in a peanut chili sauce)
Telor Bumbu Opor (hard boiled egg with a crispy fried exterior in yellow sauce)
Kerupuk Udang (homemade shrimp crackers)

Plus the soup and pastry, plus a sticky toffee pudding for dessert.

We dimmed the light the old-fashioned way (it was an LED, so we weren’t too worried about heat), but took the veil off when we needed to take food photos.

A note on shrimp crackers. I would buy those occasionally in the US; I’ll admit that the first time I bought them, I did so somewhat ironically. “Look at this weird kind of chip I am eating”, I would think, eating one. Shortly after that, I’d say: “dang, I could use a shrimp chip.” They’re totally delicious, and my love is no longer ironic. In Indonesia, the’re the typical side - you get nasi goreng (fried rice), it almost always comes with both a fried egg and some shrimp chips. Everything comes with shrimp chips. The nice restaurants make their own in-house. You make a puree of tapioca powder and shrimp (plus spices) roll it into a log, steam the log, slice thin, let it dry, then fry up the chips (they puff up like chicharones). Anyway, I may be experimenting with homemade shrimp chips when we get back home.

Conversation happens inside — sign in to Overstory to read and write comments.