beautiful Nusa Penida🌴

After one last surf on Lombok and a last breakfast Mo and me had to say goodbye to Kuta Lombok, which felt kind of weird after we had stayed there for almost two weeks. Of all the places I have visited in Indonesia I also consider it most likely to go back to Kuta Lombok some day - I really like the surf and the vibe there!! 😊

Our lovely host drove us to the harbour and we took a fast boat to Bali to then take a shuttle which would take us to another harbour where we could finally leave for Nusa Penida 😮‍💨. There are also direct fast boats from Lombok to Nusa Penida but they are only offered by the company “Golden Queen” which had such bad reviews (“we almost capsized” or “people were vomiting everywhere and the crew didn’t care”) that we decided for the save way and wanted to take two separate companies with good reviews even if that meant a layover in Bali. What we of course couldn’t know when we were booking was that our first fast boat would be cancelled…which was why the company had to put us in a boat of another company and suuurprise that was the Golden Queen one - so we could have taken the direct fast boat to Penida anyway 😂

At least the fast boat drive was better than we expected it to be (even if it was quite hot, sweaty and loud) and we arrived at Sanur Harbour in Bali. The harbour was probably the most modern thing I saw in whole Indonesia 😅😯 Mo explained to me that it was built for the G20 summit which took place in November 2022 in Denpasar so that the important people which would like to visit the small islands around Bali would have a good experience - which is for sure not the authentic one 😂 I was almost overwhelmed by so much tidiness and organization 😄

Anyway, in the end we made it to Nusa Penida where we had already organized for two scooters to be dropped off at the harbour for us. It was such a good feeling to arrive in our homestay after one day of traveling! The Ayu Hill Bungalows where we stayed had a special atmosphere (on top of a hill with a view on the ocean and into the jungle) and the owner Made was very lovely. We also liked our semi-open bathroom until I saw suuuch a big spider 🕷 on the wall inside of it in the evening 🤯😂 during the teacher training in Thailand I got used to big spiders in bathrooms, but I always had the choice to use another one in case I would see one 🫣… which wasn’t the case this time 😅 in the end we asked Made to remove it, because Mo wasn’t keen on meeting it aswell 😬 we were so happy to have our mosquito net hanged over our bed because in addition to the spider and the mosquitos that we saw, we also had many big cockroaches 🪳 in our room 😬😬

On the next day we drove around Nusa Penida with the scooter - such a beautiful island! The Jungle, small villages and the cliffs next to the ocean could be admired directly from the roads that we were driving on. In the distance we could see Bali’s vulcano Mount Batur. Although I got pain in my ear that day we visited Broken Beach, which I found so be quite impressing, and Angel Billabong - the ocean in Nusa Penida seems to be more blue than in other places!

When we randomly stopped at “Dolphin’s Beach”we accidentally saw some manta rays swimming directly under the water surface 🤯 we were quite excited (they looked so big!), especially as we had just booked our snorkeling trip for the day after, where we hoped to see manta rays under water. 😊Read more