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.