Calypso's Journal: Lombok by car

Next on the agenda in Lombok was a day tour with a group of ten of us. We were met early by our guide, Ari (or was it 'arry?), a terrific local guide, who took us to a furniture factory, a couple of temples, a village dedicated to weaving and a pottery factory. But first we stopped on a hillside to admire the view and get acquainted with a few monkeys.

As we drove through the countryside, he pointed out cashew trees and fields of peanuts, soy (they use a lot of tofu here, yuk) and chillis and, of course, the very prevalent rice paddies. In truth, there was very little open countryside along the road edges. There are just so many people here in Indonesia (2.4 million) that the villages run into one another but still they manage to plant in between all of this and up behind the villages out into the hills. Lombok is so very much greener than anything we saw on Flores where we saw little or no evidence of plantations of any description apart from rice paddies on our trip up to Kelimutu.

Inserting the shell inlays

All of the crafts we were shown were totally hand made. The intricacies of the elaborate furniture decorations; firstly drawing the designs onto the wood, then one chap carving them out to pass them on to the next one for the insertion of the shell inlays and all this to be followed by the high gloss lacquer. I must confess, I would prefer the items au natural but then I guess they wouldn't be truly Indonesian.

Before

After

The weaving was fascinating and the means of creating the patterns somewhat mind-boggling but we learned that, in this one particular village, girls are taught to weave from the age of 10 and cannot marry until such time as they are productive weavers. Bit of a roughy if you happen to be all thumbs and not prepared to sit flat on the hard floor for seven hours a day. Some of the finished products take literally months and months to produce and typically me, the one small wall hanging I really liked just happened to be the most expensive item on display. Needless to say, it's still hanging there.

This village was extremely poor and filthy. There appeared to be no effort to clear it of the tons of rubbish lying everywhere. One cruisier got quite upset with the chap showing us around and told our tour guide that he shouldn't take us to places like this unless they were prepared to do something to clean things up. His point was that perhaps if no tourists were taken there, they would realise that they'd have to improve both the village and the working conditions of those poor women who sat for hour after uncomfortable hour by themselves with no company to alleviate the long day of mindless weaving. This is a bit of a dilemma in my mind; do we interfere in another people's way of doing things or speak up and criticise? In the long term, I'm sure they would get more tourists if they made their village a pleasant experience which this most certainly was not. For this reason, I had to agree that such places should be given a miss.

The temples were interesting but very old and poorly maintained (but clean). Noteworthy was the fact that they were used by five different religions, not just Hindu or Buddist. They pride themselves that all the religions come together at times to celebrate and all is completely amicable. Perhaps the world could take a lesson here.

The further west we're moving, the more predominately Muslim it becomes and we gave up counting after we'd reached 100 mosques – they are everywhere, almost cheek by jowl and the majority are either new ones being built (huge and elaborate) or older ones being revamped to make them huge and elaborate. Why they need so many is beyond me as we've really never seen one with more than a few solitary soles inside.

It's time to move on again as we have to be in Bali this weekend to have our visas extended. It's hard to believe that we've already been in Indonesia for two months with only one more to go. So far, it's been excellent but a bit of a rush trying to get to most of the venues. As Paul says, the organisers don't seem to be able to differentiate between travelling by sail or that by plane. One schedule we had indicated “rally boats will arrive at the anchorage at 11:00 a.m. for the start of the welcoming party.” Yeah sure.

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