A weird game of Football
Gili Air, Gili Travangan, Gili Meno
T
he Gili islands are three small islands off the coast of a larger island: Lombok, which in turn is one of the thousands of islands that make up the Indonesian acrchipelago.But maybe the whole world is an island... so let's move on. You can take a boat, leave Lombok and treat yourself to a few days of absolute peace and quiet on the smallest of the three Gili islands - Gili Meno [this is ironic cause 'meno' means 'less' in Italian].
You’ll have to do without lights and electricity, fresh water, shoes and cars for a while. But Gili Meno is a miniature paradise - and all that it doesn't have, it makes up for in other ways.
The keeper of the light
Y
ou can base yourself in a wooden hut right by the sea, only a few meters from the beach. If you walk along the beach you only need to go up three steps and you'll find yourself on a porch with a little table and two lovely chairs. Insides there's a basic room with one gigantic bed and a bathroom/toilet with salted water. After a lazy day you can retire to the porch with a good book and listen to the silence, broken only by the sleepy waves.As night descends the keeper of the light arrives and puts a gas lamp on the steps. He arrives, places the lamp on the stairs and goes away - totally silent, without saying a word. Sometimes you don't even realise he's been. You lift your eyes from your book and your little lamp is there, like a precious gift from a shy angel.
Albino restaurant
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ou're always near the sea shore on Gili Meno. Almost always. The island is so small that you can walk around its circumference in two hours. And right on the seashore, blinded from too much sun, we walk ten metres with great difficulty and collapse in the shade of a straw canopy - the Albino Restaurant. A beer, two chickens under the table, a cat boiling in the heat under a palm.Of course you can't help but exchange a few words with the guy who manages the hut. He's a young Indonesian albino with white hair and eyebrows who has hung photos and postcards of Nepal on the posts that support the canopy. He dreams about mountains, hoping to be able to reach them one day. But for now he limits himself to dreaming and passes time fishing and sleeping and serving warm beer to travellers. You turn around for a second and then you turn back, and the cat has disappeared. It's six o'clock, the sun sets on the equator.
Later...later...
S
itting on the verrandah, on the seashore, wandering along the sandy paths of the miniscule hinterland, immersed in the crystal clear waters, under the salty shower, in the intense heat of the early afternoon: these moments follow on from one another but give no sense of time passing. The only thread holding the day together is the children who sell just-harvested, sweet, juicy pineapples After you've eaten three you start to say no and they know you can't take anymore but they still keep trying. They even know your reply: "Pineapple! Pineapple!.... Later, later..", and they laugh.But if you get the urge, there is a young lad, very skilled and brandishing a small machete, who transforms a pineapple into a huge 'ice-cream' that you hold by the stem stripped of the pineapple leaves and to bite into with relish. At this point the rest of the world can wait: ...later...later...
The massage G-spot
O
n Gili Meno sometimes you find yourself stretched out and dead to the world on the beach until five o'clock - exactly one hour before sunset - and when you wake up don't know what's happened to you: are you dead already or is God doing some experiments? Have you won the lottery without even realising it? Are you living out your last wish before facing a firing squad? Have you taken a great drug? Who cares, just enjoy yourself in paradise!Then on the horizon you can see two imposing figures, slow and solemn, getting closer: Godzilla and his cousin. They offer you a massage, and you, drunk with the heat, naively accept. Lying on the sand, you entrust yourself to their knowledgeable hands hoping to reach Nirvana.
But then you realise that a pair of strong, boney hands are skinning you alive, that you’re sore from the oil mixed with sand. Then you hear the worrying sound of bones breaking, yours, the sound drowned out only by the chatting and laughter of the two Indonesian matrons that are torturing you. But by now it is too late, well and truly, too late.
Ball dancing
H
ere's something incredible that you have to see. It’s really unique.If someone doesn't believe this, well then, take a plane, travel half way round the world, spend hours on the bus, in boats and walk for miles with a backpack, get eaten alive by mosquitoes, spend at least two days in the can with the runs and then we'll talk about it. Because if you're ready for that, you'll be able to enjoy the most surreal game of football ever seen in the history of man.
The pitch: a beach, sandy of course, with a steep slope and the game inevitably moving closer and closer to the waves.
The players: two groups of a random number of men, bare foot, with sarongs in various vibrant colours as uniform
The rules: an outdoor stereo system, a ball to fight over, at each foul a referee that whistles and turns on the music, stops the game and makes everyone dance until the next whistle, and then they're off running again...towards the sea of course where the ball inevitably slips toward
What about slow motion replay? Who cares? Here time passes slowly, with rhythm, but slowly.
>>> The frog Prince