Lombok, No Longer Shadow of Bali

It was a few days into my journey across Lombok when a strange, yet oddly pleasant, mental miasma descended upon me. My guide, Bahar, and I couldn’t figure out what day of the week it was. Bahar suspected it was Thursday; I thought it was Wednesday. And so, for a while, we remained lost in time.

Such temporal confusion is typical on Lombok, where the roads are rough and the tourists few. This enchanted Indonesian island is, after all, a place that seems to be perpetually arriving, yet has never quite arrived. Proximity to Bali is Lombok’s blessing, and its curse. Many residents bristle at the idea of basking in Bali’s reflected glory and point out that while only 25 miles separate the two islands, they are in fact worlds apart.

A British naturalist named Alfred Russel Wallace noted as much more than a century ago, when he observed that the flora and fauna found on Lombok are remarkably different from those of Bali. Lombok, Wallace concluded, demarcates the Asian and the Australian eco-zones. Culturally, Lombok is typically more Indonesian than Bali, if anything can be said to be typical in a nation of more than 17,000 islands and some 700 languages and dialects. Unlike mostly Hindu Bali, Lombok is 86 percent Muslim. It’s an island of Sukarno hats, mosques (many built with Saudi funds) and hardscrabble farmers. Indeed, overzealous tourism officials notwithstanding, Lombok is not “an unspoiled Bali,” or “Bali’s sister island.” Lombok is not Bali at all, and that is precisely its charm.
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