Getting off the Grid in Lombok, Indonesia

The alarm goes off at 7am and I groggily roll over to hit snooze on my phone.  A few messages, two snaps, and 5 Facebook notifications.  After my third snooze I finally wake up enough to check my emails and scroll through my Instagram – always back to the last picture I saw the day before.  Heaven forbid I get interrupted or accidentally hit the home icon and have to start all over.  I can’t miss these pictures!

This is my morning routine. every. day. Like most of us, I’m in front of a screen pretty much every waking hour of the day. I look at my phone on the way to work, my computer while at work, then switch back to my phone when I leave the office. Finally, I make it home and can turn on the TV or pick out a Netflix show.  All of us are constantly bombarded with little pixels of information that our brain takes in and absorbs.

So, when my friend Courtney decided to visit me in Singapore and graciously allowed me to choose somewhere to go, I picked Jeeva Beloam beach camp in Lombok, Indonesia.  Lombok is Bali’s big brother to the east.  While Bali grabs all the attention for being a vacation and party destination, Lombok is slowly making a name for itself in that department.

Jeeva Beloam is a set of 12 straw, wooden huts positioned in a row along the beach of a tiny cove nestled between dramatic cliffs that drop into the ocean. The water is a brilliant turquoise blue with picturesque white caps as the waves come in.

The ride to the Southeast side of Lombok takes a few hours with the majority of it on bumpy, dusty dirt roads that only 4 wheel drive can handle.  As the Jeeva Beloam staff will tell you, its meant to be rustic and isolated with no TVs, no wifi, and no cell service.  This is where we would call home for the next three days.

After we check in to our beautifully natural, wooden hut with a large bed in the middle, my fingers start to itch.  This would normally be when I asked for the wifi code and checked how much I’ve missed in the last few hours.  Or at the very least, tell my boyfriend that we’ve arrived safely.  Instead, we made our way to the restaurant hut for lunch.  As Jeeva is so isolated, they only make two meal options and it varies everyday depending on what fresh produce and meats can be found in the local markets a few hours away.  That day we had a creamy chicken pesto pasta and lightly pan fried fish with steamed vegetables.  It was simple, but delicious and flavorful.

We spent our days going to Pink Beach (aptly named so because of it’s light pink sand), kayaking, and lounging on the deck of our hut.  We’d walk the cliffs and look back at our little cove and brave the fierce winds that come through the area in late September.  I read 3 books in the few days we were there, borrowing one from their library and game room.  Courtney and I would go to bed early exhausted from our day of leisure and wake up at 7 ready to do it all over again.  The days stretched long with hours of idle time.

Three days off the grid felt like a week long vacation.  Time slowed down when I stopped worrying about FOMO and just enjoyed the moment.  I felt truly relaxed for the first time in a long time.  Not anxious to go do something or make the most of the time I had there, just content.

On our last day, as we made our way to the Airport’s Coffee Bean and Tea Leaf, I finally got wifi to check my phone.  A few messages, a couple snaps and emails.  It took me less than 20 minutes to catch up on all the messages and social media I had missed over the last few days leaving me to wonder, “Why do we constantly feel the need to stay plugged in?