We kept the best til last on our trip

TO paraphrase the well-worn phrase from the great poet, TS Eliot (who may well have stolen it from someone else), his advice to writers was: “Don’t plagiarise, steal.” We arrive at the end of our journey, and find the place we should have visited at the beginning.

That place, readers of my last week’s column will deduce, is the island of Lombok. To our tastes, it quite outclassed its famous neighbour Bali, which colonised it for centuries, and which even the Balinese now admit is over-commercialised.

Lombok finally put the run on the Balinese in 1894 but it was not until 1945 that Indonesia gained independence from the Dutch, singularly nasty colonisers. The Balinese regarded the Sasak people of Lombok rather as the English regarded the Irish — bumpkins with small brains, simian features and a proclivity for sharing their cabins with their pigs.

We have enjoyed many aspects of Lombok, especially its natural history. I wish I had brought a butterfly guide in my luggage, and a field guide to the birds. The fact that we would have to take internal flights with Air Asia deterred me.

I would also like to have had a guide to the fish of the Alas Strait, off east Lombok, through which Pacific ocean currents bring a variety of migrating and extraordinary fish close inshore. This morning, my wife and I rose at 5.45am and headed for Tanung Luar village where they are landed. The harvest displayed in every street and alley was overwhelming in colour and variety.

We were the only foreign visitors. Should any of my readers ever visit Lombok, I would recommend them to go to Tanung Luar. The spectacle is overwhelming. The market is like a vast, fishy trading-floor where a thousand traders, fish porters and fishermen gather every day. But when one sees the millions, (this is no exaggeration), of snappers, groupers, tuna, shark, rays, squid and countless other species daily landed, one must wonder how the sea can sustain such harvesting.

However, the boats unloaded by porters waist high in water off the town beach are all from Lombok, Sumbawa and Flores, and small, wooden outrigger craft, not super factory-ships like our own notorious, Atlantic Dawn, or the huge EU boats pillaging the sea off Morocco and Mauritania. Such boats have been fishing the Alas Strait for decades.

On shore, the traders, almost all women, sit in lines over their offerings while others “move through the fair” in their colourful sarongs with buckets full of bonito or crates of pink and red groupers on their heads. Teams of men in lunghis and headcloths rush back and forth from the beach using sharpened concrete reinforcing-irons bent into hooks to heft nine-foot-long hammerhead sharks to the great, wet-floored ‘shark hall’.

Amongst the hammerheads, other shark species and rays, was a giant basking shark cut into four sections, too heavy to be transported complete. Elsewhere, we saw 2m long barracuda and rays gutted and filleted on the pavement and small fish cooking in basins on wood fires.

Marlin and swordfish eight feet in length lay on mats in the dust, and moray eels a metre long. Thousands of small, bright blue fish were arranged in concentric layers in baskets, and plastic baths and buckets were crammed with sardines or finger-length squid. Hours passed like minutes as we wandered through the melee.

Later that morning, we walked shady, jungle paths up the flanks of Lombok’s highest mountain, Gunung Rinjani (3726m), much favoured by serious trekkers, to a waterfall spilling vertically from 100 feet above us.

There, in the shade of huge trees colonised by ferns and bromeliads, I added bright butterfly photos to my pictures of the sad, grey hammerhead sharks. The photos are irrelevant; scenes of Lombok will forever be etched on my mind.

On the Irish Examiner website, I was saddened and angered to read that one of our two native born white-tailed sea eagles had been shot dead.

We may denounce the gun lobby in America, but we also have deranged gun owners at home.