Was amused to read this article on the bbc news site about Globish, as it's pretty much how I've been speaking for the past few months: "Why no clean sheets?", "Your price too expensive!", "No want Tiger Balm", etc. etc. In fact I got so good at it that I was finding it hard to switch back to English 'proper' and was using it as my default language, even when we met people who spoke English as a mother tongue.... which meant we had to work hard on more than one occasion to to convince people from the UK that I wasn't Russian or Finnish or something.

We did a couple of hours of lessons learning Bahasa Indonesia in Ubud and Globish reminds me a bit of that in it's simplicity (at least for beginners) - it has no plural forms, no genders, and no conjugation of verbs. We didn't learn all that much but one phrase we used a lot with agressive taxi drivers was Saya mau jalan-jalan - "I want walk!"

We holed up on Gili Trawangan, off Lombok for six days for a bit of chilling out. Actually Trawangan has a bit of a reputation as a party island, with a party every night at one of the bars on the beach front and then often going on till dawn. But the island was big enough to make it easy to find places to chill as well, along with plenty of snorkelling and diving (yeeeah, pink fins are IN, baby!). We found a place to stay at a bargain basement price (about £8 a night) but it was a way off the main drag so we hired bikes to get about:

We took day trips over to the other islands Gili Air and Gili Meno, Gili Meno has only about 300 inhabitants but does have a bird sanctuary of sorts, check me out, Dr Doolittle.

One afternoon I decided to run all the way around the island. It's not so far - maybe 7km? But I've not run for months now and the heat and the sand beat me, I couldn't make it all the way round without a breather. I guess the muscles used in trekking, diving, biking and rafting aren't the same as in running :) Helen had a much better idea, stroll round the island along the shoreline:

Generally speaking through, it was a chance to relax after the hard life we've been living the past few months...

In Bali we had the chance to see a coffee plantation where they told us about their special coffee. The Palm Civet (a wild cat-like creature thingy) wanders around and eats the coffee beans, and the bean ferments in its stomach for a few days. Then when it comes out, people go round and collect the poo and make it into coffee. How people discover these things is beyond me, but I'll try anything once!

It cost a fortune - that jar costs 25 USD, I got just the one cup which cost me 30,000 Rupiah - about £2. And yup, it was good. Not sure I'll be making a habit of drinking it though.

We visited the ATM and withdrew the maximum it would let us - 3 million rupiah - that's about 182 pounds. It was a bit confusing at first dealing with hundreds of thousands of units every day, but we soon got used to it. Very few things cost less than a thousand rupiah (about 6p) anyway so a lot of the time people drop off the word "thousand" for simplicity - although coins for hundreds of rupiah do exist.

...was a fairly quiet affair. We were in Ubud, which isn't really a party town (that would be Kuta, down the road, which was packed solid by all accounts.) We still managed to do a bar crawl of sorts, and ended up in the reggae bar, which wasn't playing reggae at all but ROCK POWER!