Blindly Navigating the Gili Islands

Originally written 26th May 2025

I made a major mistake leaving my 👁️ contact lenses in our bags in Sanur (Bali, Indonesia), only discovering this after the 4-hour ‘fast’ boat ride to Gili T island. At first I thought it was just annoying to not be able to wear sunglasses… Then it hit me - our main activity for the brief weekend trip was 🤿 snorkeling! After researching the possibility of various masks and checking if I could buy contacts anywhere on the small island without cars (just horse-drawn carts, bicycles and electric scooters) - I was 100% SOL. It was unsurprisingly impossible. I was unsure about trying to snorkel without my contacts, because I'm really myopic (AKA ‘blind as a bat’). Legally too blind to drive. So could I trust James and Leo to navigate us through a choppy sea?

Well, I decided to give it a try. During the first snorkeling session, we lost our group amongst other tour groups and couldn't find the boat (I literally couldn't read the boat names if you gave me $1 million) but after those moments of panic, we found our guide and boat and didn't make the same mistake again. I couldn't see the detail of the beauty under the sea but I was able to identify the colors of the fish blobs and coral!

I thought the tour company was a bit boastful by 100% guaranteeing us to see a 🐢 turtle. James joked that perhaps they had a turtle in a box on the boat just in case. But then, at the end of the trip, this magic happened…

This turtle chilled with us for a bit!

The value for the money was excellent. It was nice to revisit Gili Air for lunch as well, which looked quite different from 9 years ago. So many 🛥️ boats!

I hope we can come back diving one day, when Leo is old enough, and I hope there are still beautiful creatures thriving in the Gilis. We saw so much dying coral 🪸 on each of the islands - quite sad. There are great organizations like the Gili Eco Trust working on reef restoration.