A Villa Called the Alborán

You carry your own bags up the north path on Gili Air, because the alternative is the horse and cart, and the horses, though they look well kept, are doing work you would rather not be the reason for. There is no engine running anywhere on the island, and there has never been one. It is packed sand and bicycle track the whole way, eight degrees south of the equator, the heat sitting on you with real weight. By the time the path opens toward the north shore you have earned the house you are walking to, which is the right way to arrive at a place called the Alborán.

You reach the Gilis from Bali, by boat, and the crossing is part of the education. A dozen operators run the route from the island's east coast, out of a handful of harbours, and which one you take is a negotiation with the weather as much as the timetable. We crossed with Bluewater Express, who are about as professional as the sea lets anyone be: a car meets you on the Bali side and runs you to their own terminal, the boat is quick, and the one thing they will not promise, because they cannot, is that the water behaves. Give it three or four hours, and rather more if the sea has an opinion. There are three Gili islands, and they are not interchangeable. Gili Trawangan, the largest, is the one with the full-moon parties and the clubs, the island people mean when they talk about the Gilis and dancing. Gili Air is its quieter sibling, the one you come to when you have done the other, or when you never wanted it in the first place.

It is not a big island. We walked the whole of its coast in a little over an hour, though at a brisk pace and only because we did it in the morning; by the later part of the day the humidity has closed in and the heat makes a circuit of anything an act of some ambition. The rest of the time you get around on bicycles, or in the horse-drawn carts that do the work the absence of engines leaves behind. The villa gives you two bikes for the purpose. You take them out, you come back, you leave them against the wall. After a day or two the quiet stops being something you notice and becomes the thing you are there for.

The quiet is not silence, and it is worth being accurate about what fills it. With no engines anywhere, two sounds carry the length of the island and you are never quite out of range of either. One is the sea. The other is the call to prayer from the island's mosque, five times over, the first of them before light. Gili Air is a religious place, and it repays a little attention: to come during Ramadan would be to meet a different island altogether from the one a quiet month shows you. The people who live here are generous with a visitor who takes the trouble to engage, and the only price of that is the obvious one, to be mindful of their faith and to dress as a guest rather than as an advertisement for somewhere else.

The name was a coincidence, and not one I went looking for. We were met at the villa by Vanessa, who welcomed us in and showed us round, and who found in Ana, inside a minute, someone from her own coast. Both are from Málaga province, the stretch east of the city where the Alborán Sea does its quiet work against Andalusia, and it was for that water that Vanessa and her partner had named the house, spelling it exactly as the sea is spelled, before moving most of the way around the world to build it. It is the sort of coincidence you stop walking for.

The villa is a single storey: one bedroom, a pool, the two bikes by the door, and we were, Vanessa thought, the third or fourth people ever to stay in it. The house is a quiet argument for restraint: a pitched roof of thatch over white walls, a timber frame holding the living space open to the air, a stone bath the colour of the walls, the pool set into the courtyard. It is Mediterranean in its bones and tropical in its materials, more or less the house two people from the Málaga coast would build if you gave them an island and asked them to feel at home on it.

What Vanessa told us across the fortnight was the better story. She and her partner had come to Gili Air as visitors first, and never quite let the idea of it go. "We loved the island and its way of life so much that we sold everything in Torre del Mar, moved here and made our dream," she said. "Which is where you are now staying." When the chance came to build, they took it, on land held together with a local islander they had come to know. That partnership is not incidental. In Indonesia a foreigner cannot simply buy land. It is not impossible, but it is made deliberately hard, the law written so that island communities are not quietly bought out from under themselves. What you get instead are arrangements like Vanessa's: outsiders and islanders bound into the same ground. We saw her often after that, around the island with her shopping; she and her partner live here still, only not in the villa, which is the thing that pays for the life. We were passing through for a fortnight. They had built a life on it, and knew the difference.

We had known, before we came, that there was a court. This is the part that still seems improbable. Someone had taken an entire padel court, the glass and the steel and the turf and the slab beneath it, and brought it, piece by piece, to an island with no vehicles to move any of it, by boat and then by cart, and built it at the end of a sand lane. It runs the way a lot of things on Gili Air run, through a WhatsApp group: you join it, you see who is on, you turn up. Padel Gili Air, the outfit is called, with a Facebook page and an Instagram and, the evening we left our details, a quiet interest in where we had come from. Fifteen pounds a head, which is nothing to a visitor and a great deal to anyone who actually lives there.

We played three times, on the borrowed rackets they keep for people who arrive without their own, which is most people. Once with an Italian who lives over on Lombok and has been crossing to Gili for twenty years, long enough that the island reads as routine to him and a marvel to everyone he plays. And twice with a Spaniard named Hector, which was the best of it. What you learn fast is the heat. You sweat from the first point and you do not stop, and it does not matter whether you have come out at dawn or under the lights after dark; the air gives you nothing back, and the game becomes partly a negotiation with it.

There is a small café beside the court, Il Baretto, and we sat at it with Hector and his partner more than once, both of them living and working on the island, the conversation running the way it does when the game is over and there is no reason to hurry. They talked about Gili from the inside, which is not the version a fortnight gives you, and we listened to it. It is an easy thing to romanticise a place where you do not have to make the rent, and the surest correction is an hour with someone who does.

The court is the unlikely thing, but the water is the reason most people come. The island is ringed with restaurants and bars and dive schools, and you can make a serious study of the diving if that is what you are here for; we found we wanted less than that. The better hours went on snorkelling straight off the beach, minding the coral, which minds you back if you do not. The reward, when the day gives it to you, is the marine life the Gilis are known for, and above all the resident turtles that live off these shores and treat a swimmer as neither threat nor novelty, only as one more thing in the water with them.

The food held its own against all of it, and it is fair to say it ranges widely; the honest verdict is mixed, and the way through it is two rules. The first is that the fresh fish, which you will find more or less everywhere, is more or less always right. The second is Bahar Culinaryology, the one restaurant we went back to three times; on an island you can cross in an hour, that is as much a verdict as a habit. The cooking was Sasak, the food of Lombok, the larger island Gili Air belongs to and that most visitors fold lazily into Bali; it is in fact its own kitchen, and on the same menu it reached as far as Manado, a rica-rica bright with basil. The walls carried framed pairs of reduplicated Indonesian words with their meanings set underneath: laki-laki, kupu-kupu, tiba-tiba, the language teaching itself to anyone waiting for a table. We ordered the ayam taliwang, Lombok's own dish, boneless chicken thigh worked through a marinade of chilli and shrimp paste and cooked just short of dry. Then we ordered it again. Four times across three visits, Ana and I.

The evenings on Gili Air belong to two things, and the first is the massage. The island keeps more of them than it can plausibly need, at every price a person might want to pay, so the only real question is not whether to have one but how many, and which was the best. Ours was Slow Spa. We took the organic package for two, a couple of hours long: a signature massage that borrows by turns from India, China and Europe, worked with a blend of aloe vera picked that morning and island coconut oil, and then a scrub the therapists make themselves from ginger and lemon, which they will tell you is edible, and they are not wrong to mention it. It came to a little over two million rupiah for the pair of us, which is a smaller sum than it sounds. And the treatment was not quite the thing. The room was a covered courtyard left open to the sky at one end, and while we lay there a tropical downpour arrived and fell through the opening in a clean sheet, near enough to watch and not to touch, a water feature nobody had to install. We drank a herbal tea and let it come down.

The second thing the evenings are for is the sunset, which happens on the west side, and around which the island has quietly organised its late afternoons. You cross to the western shore, find a bar that suits you, and watch the sun go into the sea with a cold coconut in your hand. It is not a sophisticated pleasure. It does not need to be.

The mornings divide people. If you are up with the light, the island keeps a good number of yoga studios that open before the heat does, and there is more to that than the setting; Ana writes elsewhere in this issue about what a life of that kind of movement is actually for. If you are not that sort of person, the answer is Gili Coffee Roasters, who roast their beans on the island and pour a range wide enough to take in a Kintamani from over the water in Bali, and who will begin a morning better than discipline generally manages.

The island is not standing still, and you can watch it change. On one morning's ride we passed construction, serious for a place this size, crews hand-building new stone paths where until lately there had been dirt tracks worn through the trees to the beach by the people who use them. My colleague Jim Gilliat first came in 2005, and when I described the scene he put it plainly: the Gili Air of 2026 is not the island he found twenty years ago.

Bali gets the noise and most of the visitors, and we will come to it in a later issue; Gili Air is the quieter case, the one you make the crossing for. There was a court at the end of a sand lane, booked through a group chat, with a Spaniard waiting to play and a kitchen worth crossing the island for. There was a sea with turtles in it and a mosque you could set the day by, two bikes against a wall and a name over the door that belonged to a stretch of water eight thousand miles the other way. The name on the villa had half-promised some of this. It did not have to deliver all of it.