The Wallace Line

The next day we left Bali travelling overland to the Padang Bai port on the eastern side of Bali to catch a ferry to Gili Air. We had a large group probably 30 people the majority of which was children, this made boarding the ferry far more chaotic than normal which I am sure was crazy anyway. We threw in 8 families, an archaic ticketing process, a narrow pier, 95 weather and what could go wrong?!?! Actually everything was fine and we finally boarded the boat with aircon (air conditioning) which was a life saver, my shirt was completely soaked which is becoming a daily occurrence even when not doing much of anything.

To get to Gili Air we were required to cross the Lombok Straight which brought us across the Wallace Line. The imaginary line was drawn between the two islands by Alfred Wallace who noticed that the species on either side of the Lombok Straight were strikingly different. The species on Lombok are more closely related to animals in Australia while the animals on Bali are descended from Asiatic species. It was later theorized that the fauna could migrate along the chain of island until the Lombok straight because when sea level was lower exposed land allowed for migration except for the Lombok Straight which has a very deep channel and prevented migration. Wallace was a contemporary of Charles Darwin and came to similar conclusions about species and what was to be known as evolution. Yes, I totally bored everyone on the boat talking about it.