The Best Areas to Stay on Lombok

Senggigi is the main tourist area on the mainland, with the town stretching along several fantastic bays on the west coast, and is only 20 minutes from the island’s Selaparang airport. It is the ideal base from which to explore the island, and all major tourist attractions can be reached by day trips from Senggigi, including boat trips from Senggigi Bay out to the Gilis. There is a wide range of accommodations ranging from the five-star Sheraton Senggigi Beach Resort to elegant private villas to comfortable small hotels and home stays. The main street in town runs parallel to the beach and is lined with restaurants, shops, banks, moneychangers and other tourist facilities. Nowhere near as developed as Kuta in Bali, Senggigi is a delightful place to stay while relaxing, dining and exploring.

Senggigi Bay is a large clean beach around which Senggigi has developed, with resorts running from the beach to the main road. The beach is a great place to hang out, sunbath and enjoy a massage, or swim and snorkel in the clear waters. The Pasar Seni (Art Market) faces onto the beach, with restaurants and bars overlooking the bay and small shops selling souvenirs, clothes and handicrafts in the market behind. The beachfront hotels and restaurants are good places to watch the magical Lombok sunsets, when the sun sinks into the ocean behind Bali, silhouetting the volcanoes against the sky.

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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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Is Lombok The Next Bali?

For years it has lived in the shadow of its more famous neighbor Bali. Now Indonesia’s pristine Lombok Island is making a concerted effort to build itself up as the next Bali, while trying to maintain its natural charm. Slower to catch the tourism train than its neighbor to the west, Lombok has been promoted as “unspoiled Bali”. But a future US$600 million development may see it emerge on par with Bali as a world-class tourism destination, according to the United Arab Emirates-based developer.

Tourists visiting Lombok typically treat it as a side-trip to Bali, staying just a few days. The Japanese and Australians, Bali’s top two groups of tourists, come to Lombok for the surfing. The Koreans come here to honeymoon, the Europeans see it more like an extension of Bali, and expatriates come from Jakarta for the relaxation, explains Dominique Duvivier, the general manager of Accor’s Novotel Lombok.
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