Padang Bai

Tuesday September 24th we bought bus tickets to go to Padang Bai. This turned out to be a full minibus where Nico had to sit on my lap until we came to Ubud where some people got off and some new passengers joined us. Then we cramped our three butts onto two seats and Nico actually fell asleep for a while.
When we finally arrived in Padang Bai I was a bit confused. I thought this place was supposed to be a bit slow, but when the boat from the Gili Islands came in and we tried to just get through all the people it didn't feel slow or relaxing at all.
We got a double room with shared bathroom and toilets (there's nobody to share with so that's no problem) at Beji Bay Resort and we have a pool :) It's low season so there's practically nobody at the hotel, so it's mellow. We chose this place because it's close to Blue Lagoon Beach, a beach that's supposed to be nice and where you can snorkel the coral reef. We went there today and was a bit surprised. The beach was nice enough, but the corals stretched all the way to the beach so the waves smashed into the corals and made it quite hard to get out to deeper waters to be able to swim and snorkel. We rented snorkel equipment and a life vest for Nico and got through the waves so he could see the corals and all the fish. This was fun and all until he saw a big fish. Neither me nor JT saw the fish so we don't really know how big it was but Nico says that it was about 40cm long, had white eyes and a big snoutelike mouth. He got so scared that he didn't want to snorkel anymore so we took a break. After a while he wanted to try again but now the tide was low and it was a BIG challenge to get out without hurting ourselves on all the corals that now were surfacing. Now we didn't see much, and luckily we got back in with only me getting a little scratch on one knee.
Padang Bai isn't as busy when there's no boats coming and I like this place better now than when we first got here. Our neighbour is Top Inn witch is a restaurant, tourist information, you can do your laundry, they can arrange taxi or boat wherever you want to go, and they have quite cheap accommodation. The food there is great and they are really conscious about the way they prepare the food, and they make everything from scratch. It's absolutely fantastic! They also have a Silver Smith that's working all day long making jewelry. Today Nico bought a necklace with a turtle, and we got to see the final steps while he made it.

Dinner at Top Inn

Blue Lagoon Beach

Our pool :)

We decided to stay here for three nights, so we'll head off again on Friday. Our plan was to go to Gili Air and from there go to Amed, but after talking to a guy here that says that there was no boat from Gili to Amed (even though it says so in our travel book) we might change the plan... or maybe not.... who knows :)

Live life and love it <3

Lotte