🌴 WELCOME TO PARADISE 🌴
Indonesia is probably the greatest country I've been to so far. Beautiful beaches, perfect waves, cheap accommodation and food and incredibly friendly people.
But let's start from the very beginning...
August 2015, summertime back home in Germany and my friend Tom and me took a plane to surf the most perfect waves we have ever been to. Now in 2019, looking back on this adventure, this was actually pretty stupid. Holiday season, good weather back home and a long flight, which causes a lot of CO2...
And yes, Bali is pretty nice. When arriving to the so called "Island of Gods", we saw rice fields and volcanos from the plane. And many surf spots along the coast. Exactly what we were looking for.
The Buddhist island is touristy. Very touristy... The first impressions of this paradise island were incredible and Tom and me rented our own motor scooters to get along on the island.
After one day, we already felt like this is a bit too much and not what we have been looking for. For most tourists, Bali is paradise on earth and they come back only to this Indonesian island, ignoring the remaining 17.507 islands of the largest muslim country in the world.
So we were making plans to leave the island just three days after having arrived and thought about heading east, where people, landscape, waves and culture were supposed to be very different.
The next morning we took the ferry to LOMBOK ...
But already on the ferry we got confronted with the dark sides of these paradise islands. Just before arriving to Lombok, a ferry employee collected all the plastic rubbish from the bins into huge black plastic bags and went to the back of the ferry.
I came too late, I just saw all the bags floating behind the boat and was like WTF!? This can't be real. But this is the sad reality and in my eyes a educational problem. This wasn't the last time we were shocked like this.
