Fin & Gill

Let me tell you the biggest highlight of my last trip.

It's actually something I've done before in Bali.

Snorkeling.

First time doing this was last August with two friends in Amed. We had fun, they got back upland, I stayed for more. I knew I liked it but that was all. After that time, I didn't feel like I wanted more snorkeling.

Until Gili. I never been to Gili before. People said that the water's clear, way clearer than Bali. I just yeahed them and took it for granted because I hadn't actually seen it live. So once I got there, boom, it struck my eyes, my mind and my heart. Especially after I got the equipment, and swam among the surface of the ocean.

Oh. My. God.

It was seriously clear. I could see the corals, the fishes were swimming before me, I even saw a sea turtle! It was so beautiful I didn't even notice that I was like a hundred meters away already from the beach. And when I reached the level where it was like two stories deep to the ocean floor, I began to feel this fear of drowning -started panicking and losing my breath- so I acted calm and swam back to the sand.

But it couldn't stop me from swimming back to that point.

I knew I would started to lose my calm again but,

I just couldn't get enough of that. 

Picture of Atlantica, obtained from here.

If I now recall the way I lost my mind, gave no shit about the possibility of drowning and kept swimming instead, feels like I wanna hit the back of my head and shout to myself "what the hell were you thinking??"

But then if I recall of how beautiful the view I peeked from that calm surface was, how vast the blue space around me and how I subconsciously praising Allah when swimming near the depth, I can actually block my own back-head-attack and answer, "but you enjoyed it eh?"

I'm into it. So much.

For now yes, I'm into it.

Well... I hope it lasts longer.

And I get more chance to snorkel.

And when seeing the ocean, I can be calmer.

But umm...

Calmer while all around me is just, water? How?

Should I make a deal with Ursula?

Eight Legged Karma

"Universe conspires."

You know when you felt like everything around you, together hand in hand trying to make you feel some certain experience, yeah the phrase was all over my head when I had a vacation last week in

Bali and Gili

Left is Gili Trawangan and right is Gili Meno.

So I, my friends and my friends' friends, we sort of believed that there was this big karma thing following us along our trip. Or maybe up till now? Only God knows.

There were five of us. Call us V, A, R, K and J -suspects are under identity protection due to the fear of ongoing karma. We spent two nights at this ethnic-down-to-nature stay named, let's say TS. The place was, ethnic-ish and culture-ish and, umm, down to nature? So yea it was like a cottage full of plants and wooden floors and bridge, lied next to a big rice paddy, stuff like that. No wonder if you see bugs and giant insects crawling around the living room.

Not to mention a spider. A gigantic arachnid. Creating nest. In the girls' room. I saw the creature a while before the girls arrived in Bali. Well I planned to inform them but I forgot. Until the next day, K and J reported us a paranoid moment they had last night with the spider, ended up with committing a murder. Yes, they killed the spider.

And so the karma began.

Started with the most tolerable one, felt by R. She didn't kill the spider, she's the one with the least interaction with the spider, so nature punished her by only spilling some booze on her dress. Lucky her.

Worse thing came to A. He was the one inviting all of us to stay at TS, that's why. So when we were about to return home from Ubud, the car he chartered was kinda broken, and he had to deal with all the mechanical thing for two hours while the girls and I went shopping. We were jerks I know, leaving him alone with the car and the bli blis. Maybe that's why the universe kept the best karma for us.

I, however, was placed the third on the list. You know where I did wrong right? I knew that there were a creepy crawling creature nesting near the girls but I didn't even say a word about that? That's kinda crucial. So the ocean paid off the spider's grudge and gave me this terrible seasickness along the way from Bali to Gili. To make it worse, I threw up six times :)

Left is me and my karma. The pic was taken on our way back to Bali, that's why I'm smiling.
On the right is J, and one of our karmas. Go on reading to find out :)

Well the worst part now, of course, happened to the assassin duo K and J. They both also got the seasickness I felt, and mother nature summoned an extra karma for them. The late spider sent off his two best friends for K and J.

We were at the Monkey Forest when K got her 'company'. Ha, Monkey Forest. Seemed like we were teasing the karma and approaching danger, eh? Well by that time we hadn't noticed about all these coincidence so, yeah... A devil monyet ambushed her. No signals, no prologues, it just attacked. Poor K, she was shaking and looking extremely pale.

Now that we realized about the karma, we put our guards on. But unlucky J, when we were at El Kabron to have dinner, she was blinded by hunger and the meals and subconsciously let her walls down so... A giant praying mantis took this chance and jumped to her face as the revenge for the spider's death. Shocking. She couldn't ever avoid that.

No picture of J and her praying mantis, sorry, it happened so fast no camera was prepared.

Well yeah. Karma exists.

And we paid to what we did.

On that exact time like, right away.

I learned so many thing from this.

That animals possess a strong, intense relationship.

That land and sea are mystically linked one another.

And that Bali, is sacred

Wait a sec, I just realized a thing: monkey, and praying mantis? Is this... Kung Fu Panda?? Oh wait--OMG! R's nickname is Panda! :(

Universe did play something with us...