lombok day 1: departure and Qunci Villas

ari and i only had 2 hours of sleep tonight. we had to pack and re-cook koda’s meal for the long weekend. i woke up feeling exhausted, but i quickly got up, washed my face and put on some make up. that made me feel better.
we called for a cab and left the house at 5am. aina was barely awake. after the check-in — which went very quickly — we still had time for have breakfast. so we went to McD… aina loves hashbrowns. and that woke her up for real.

we’re flying Garuda from Terminal 3. and the new terminal was soooo large that we needed to take a sky train to get to our gate… amazing. there was a small playground right in front of the gate, so aina was happily playing while waiting for ari to have his last cigarette before boarding.

i tried to sleep all the way to Jakarta, but it wasn’t very successful. the good thing about non-budget airline is that there is this touch-screen entertainment system behind every seat. it has games. the bad thing is aina loves to play games. and she wanted to play these games… which means that she’d have at least one question for me every 2 minutes. there goes my plan to sleep.

we landed in Cengkareng Airport, the home of Garuda Indonesia. and in its own home, the plane didn’t get a parking spot, so we had to take the stairs down, walked outside and took a bus to the terminal. everything went very slow; the bathroom trip, the immigration, even the walking and the bus ride… by the time we got to the baggage claim area, our luggage was the last one on the conveyor belt.
then, we had to change terminals, because our next leg was for Lombok, it was a domestic flight. it was actually my first time taking the shuttle bus in this airport. considering how bad the traffic was in the airport, i was amazed that the bus could move at all. it got really crowded when we picked up passengers at Terminal 3. it was soooo crowded and soooo slow that i sorta wished that we had taken a cab from T2 to T3…

at T1, we met up with the rest of the groups:

• Chili, Oma and my mom are from Jakarta group.
• Ticia, Ditha, Ayoub and Gaizka are the Pamulang group.
• Ramanda, Fenny and Alika are the Melbourne group.
• we — Ari, Thalia and Aina — are the Singapore group.

yep, this is definitely a group vacation: 15 members (well, 13 for now, since two will arrive tomorrow night, due to work schedules) with ages ranging from 1 year old to 89 years old. woohoo!
from then on, it was a lot of fun…

the flight to Lombok was great. i slept most of the time. i noticed that there were a lot of kids in the plane, but all of them behaved very well. there was no crying at all. amazing.
i was surprised to see how new and shiny the Lombok International Airport was. it was very clean, too. and finally, we didn’t have to walk outside from/to our plane. this airport has enough “belalai”… yay!

we were picked up by a minibus from the hotel. that way all 13 of us could fit in one car. we were so hungry that we asked if we could stop by a local restaurant to have our late lunch — it was almost 3pm. of course, the minibus driver immediately suggested the famous Ayam Taliwang. and, of course, we all agreed.

he brought us to RM Ayam Taliwang Irama, located in Mataram, among other ayam taliwang restaurants. and wow… the food was yummy! spicy, but sooooo good! my favorite was their Plecing Kangkung. super spicy, but the sambal was so fresh, i couldn’t get enough of it… until my tummy started to feel burning hot.

then, we finally arrived at our hotel: Qunci Villas. the place is just amazing. it’s simple, homey and luxurious at the same time. each group had their own room: the Pamulang, Melbourne and Singapore groups stay in the ocean-view rooms… with a view like this below.

my jaw dropped. the place was awesome! and soooo clean… my grandma kept muttering about how do they keep the stone path so white and shiny…

the Jakarta group, which consists of my grandma, mom and aunt, got the one-bedroom villa with pool.
we settled down in our rooms, changed our clothes, took turns going to the bathrooms, then all of us went to the villa, and swam there!

the place is quite children-friendly. one thing we noticed, though. all of their pools are very deep (1.5 meters) and no wading pool for kids. and for people who can’t swim, that’s pretty deep…
anyways, alika seems to be attached to aina’s hair…

after the swim and shower, we regrouped at the beach and had a barbeque dinner outdoors under the sky, courtesy of the hotel. the food was yummy… seafood was very fresh, and the veggie kebab was excellent. even the potato salad was great.

unfortunately, the weather didn’t agree. in the middle of dinner, it started to pour and got really heavy very quickly. we had to run into the sheltered restaurant and continued our dinner there. my grandma was happy though, because before the rain she was complaining that she couldn’t see her food under the moonlight… cute!
» today’s photos are in flickr’s 04/04/2013 photo album.