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LOMBOK ISLAND,
ESCAPE TO THE NEW PARADISE OF INDONESIA
Lombok Island Complete Information, Lombok Hotels and Resorts
Online Booking and Reservation, Lombok Island Travel
Guide Information.
Mount Rinjani National Trekking Information, Lombok
Honeymoon Information, Lombok Biking, Lombok sailing and many
more.......!
Lombok is a
still undiscovered paradise with lush tropical
greenery, which will attract every heart with
fascination. Fastly becoming one of the popular
places of
Indonesia. The half a million people which
visit
Lombok every year is only a very small amount
compared with Bali, by their number will
certainly increase, since hotels have been
built over the recent years. All good places along
the beach, even those which can only be reached by
jeep, are already bought by contractors from
Jakarta.
Comparisons with the
neighboring Bali are remarkable, the
island is only a little smaller, and the
population is only a little smaller. There are about
100,000 Balinese in
West-Lombok, descendants from the intruders
in the 17th century. They maintain a network of
temples and have the same rituals and ceremonies
as the Balinese
on the other island. Besides this minority
the two cultures on the island are very
different. The local population of Lombok,
the Sasak, is Moslem; their art and religious
lives are very different from those of their
Hinduism neighbors.
The name 'Lombok'
could have been derived from that of a hot red chill
pepper, but this is probably a folk etymology. The
Sasak name their island Bumi Gora, 'the dry
agricultural soil', or Selaparang, to an old
principality in East-Lombok. With its shape,
Lombok
looks a little bit like a lumbung, Lombok a traditional
rice shed, and measures about 80 km from north to
south, and seventy km from west to east. A big
peninsula in the southwest stretches to the west, in
the southeast is another, smaller, peninsula. Off
the coast are groups of small islands, which
are names 'Gili', the Sasak word of
island. Some of them are inhabited by fishermen
and some cattle, the most known - Gili Air, Gili
Meno and Gili Trawangan, off the northwestern
coast and Gili Nanggu in southwest of
Lombok - are home to masses young, mainly European
tourists, especially in the months July, August and
September.
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