Island East of Bali, a Backpacker’s Hideaway Goes Upscale

Little Trawangan & its more relaxed sisters, Meno & Air, make up the Gili Islands, an archipelago in Indonesia's Bali Sea that lies off the coast of Lombok & is reachable only by boat. (The voyage from Bali takes about 90 minutes by speedboat.) Known as the party island & the largest of the three, Trawangan has developed a hedonistic reputation as a miniature Koh Samui, with all-night full moon parties & an array of illegal substances openly on the market.

THE blaze of white sand licked by the surf was dotted one recent sunlit afternoon with fishing boats & their local owners, a pack of bored men in flip-flops who each kept one eye on their hand of cards & the other on the pale tourist cargo streaming from the docked speedboat onto the main road of the island of Gili Trawangan, east of Bali, in search of beach, beer & bungalow. From the midst of the throng, the full force of this island's transformation from little fisherman settlement to global tourist refuge became resoundingly clear. The wail of that ubiquitous island ambassador, Bob Marley, appeared to be coming from every bar & cafe, whose stools overflowed with a sunburned masses gazing at the cerulean water, leafing through guidebooks & sipping Bintang beers.

But in the last few years, this island has begun to go stylish, with villa resorts & upscale eco-lodges that have proliferated like a luxe algae bloom, attracting the rich & the stroller-laden to their personal pools & solar energy for some clear-conscience indulging.

It was one of these that I was three times destined for, a just-opened complex of villas called the Trawangan Resort at the fringe of the island's frenzied development, where goats graze beneath tattered D.J. party posters & bar reggae fades on the breeze. A horse-drawn carriage known as a cidomo  cars & mopeds are banned  soon arrived with the baggage. After checking in, I headed in to a maze of high concrete walls that wound away from the beach to a pair of wooden doors, which opened onto a villa with a private pool, cabana & bed sheets that, for its nightly cost, one hoped hit the stratosphere of thread counts. The resort was so new that kinks still had to be worked out  hot water was absent from my room & the electricity failed in the work of a brief storm.

The resort is the latest of around 10 similarly luxurious accommodations to open its doors in the last few years, adding spa treatments & horseback riding to the usual diving & snorkeling diversions long favored by the backpacker set. A bicycle ride around the island, which takes only a half-hour, leads away from the hubbub of bars & young local men hawking cannabis on the southeastern finish of the island toward isolated beaches & new eco-villas, their wide patios offering views of palm trees & the ocean.

The Gili Islands were largely uninhabited until the middle of last century, as they lack freshwater sources. Even today, all freshwater & provisions from beer to beef are brought by boat from Lombok.

Boulong, 36, a fisherman & snorkeling guide who grew up on the Gilis, recalls his grandfather telling him how settlers came to Gili Air & then slowly moved on to the other islands to fish, build mosques & start families. As a kid, Boulong remembers seeing the first tourists, backpackers from Bali, coming for the day to revel in the solitude of the Gilis beaches & turquoise waves  still the main attraction for today's tourists.

Yet even as stressed-out foreigners arrive seeking refuge from the outside world, the Gilis have suffered modern issues. The large reefs that encircle the islands bear scars from decades of blast fishing, in which underwater explosives were used to kill large numbers of fish but also destroyed the coral. In the work of the rainy season, runoff from Lombok & Bali sometimes brings lost sandals, plastic bags & other trash to Trawangan's beaches.

Things are changing in a positive way as people understand they require to merge business with caring for the environment, Ms. Robb said.

Locals & expatriates are trying to cease this environmental destroy from spreading. Blast fishing has been abandoned, & environmentalists on the islands have pioneered a know-how that makes use of a little electric current to speed up coral growth, leading to a rebirth of marine life. Delphine Robb, who came to Trawangan four years ago from France for a diving work & never left, runs the Gili Eco Trust, a local environmental group that encourages resorts & fishermen to go green. The dive shops support the trust's reef restoration projects financially, & resorts are composting & switching to nonchlorinated pools.

On a snorkeling trip, recent successes were abundantly clear: puffer fish flitted among new coral growth as a hawksbill turtle poked around near some psychedelic parrot fish. There's over a dozen dive sites, & sea turtles, stingrays & thousands of reef fish abound in deeper water.

The Gilis are recovering from political crises, . When Muslim extremists bombed a nightclub in a popular Bali resort town in 2002, killing over 200 people, tourism on the Gilis evaporated. But the beauty of the islands has proved irresistible, as well as a later bombing on Bali in 2005, in which over 20 people died, had only a minor impact on the return of divers & surfers. Indeed, local businesses document that recent political unrest in Thailand seems to have sent beach-hungry travelers to Trawangan in search of white sand & increasingly glamorous accommodations.