Yep. It’s raining again.

I arrive on Gili Air in the afternoon. I planned to meet my friend Sylvain in the evening so I start to explore the area while it’s still day light. It’s a small and intimate island so it doesn’t take me long to walk around. I love this feeling of proximity. We are only four of five tourists arriving in Gili Air today so it’s a piece of cake to find a cool and cheap shack to stay for two nights. (Bambu homestay)

Nobody ever wants to put their bare feet directly on the ground in South East Asia for a lot of reasons (health, respect of the tradition, dangers and so on). My flip flops and my converse have been my best friends for four months already. Usually when you see a traveler in bare feet walking the streets of Bangkok or Battambang, it’s or:

1. This person is visiting a temple and had to remove his/her shoes, obviously.

2. Somebody stole the shoes of this person while he/she was in a temple.

3. “Too drunk to keep your shoes on your feet mate? Just go back to your hostel.”

4. This traveler is crazy or/and wants an infection or/and wants to experience a stay in a south East Asia hospital.

The very next morning, I planned to cross the island by foot (no worries it’s 10 minutes of walk) to go scuba diving with Sylvain. But it’s raining. it’s raining so much that the sandy path are filled up with water and I have to walk in pools (not even puddles).

I’m sure you’ve tried to walk in the water with your flip flops on before. You must have felt the incredible sensation of instability due to the water creating a little pillow between the slippery material of the shoes and your feet. I nearly fell six thousand times in one minute… so I made a big decision that contradicted my “rule number one in SEA”…

(I can hear a lot of you saying that I have a lot of “rule number one in SEA“…)

So I decided to come back home. Drop my flip flop in my bedroom and for the first time in South East Asia, start to walk bare feet in the streets of Gili Air.

It probably looks like nothing for you but I felt that a lot of things changed that day. I was the girl who was braving the danger, the girl with no shoes. Yeah!