For many years, GoPro has been the go-to action camera brand. The gold standard. In fact (much like DJI with drones), it’s been the only reliable action camera. But in recent years, things are changing. Unsatisfied with dominating the drone market (and I daresay having a laugh at GoPro’s failed intrusion into said market), DJI have muscled into the action camera world with their Osmo Action line. And now, there’s an even newer player in the game. Enter the Insta360 Ace Pro.

I’ll be honest. If you laid out this trip for me a few weeks prior, I would probably turn it down. The idea of an overly-priced flight (two, actually), travelling during Eid (notoriously the very worst possible time to travel in Indonesia), for just a short, one-day whistle-stop tour of one of the country’s most popular tourist destinations? Hrm. It’s not my cup of tea on paper. No thanks.

I suppose the title is up for debate, here. It depends how you define “cool”. For chic hotels, Instagrammable eateries and a Bali-esque wave of gentrification, Kuta (on the south coast of Lombok) is in a league of its own. It’s where the vast majority of tourists in Lombok now head to. So Ampenan isn’t “cool” in the conventional sense of the word. It’s cool because it’s interesting. Or, at least, it’s interesting to me.

That seemingly inevitable thing happened where I entered my late twenties and began to wonder what it would be like to shoot film. Then one of my best friends Ben (also in his late twenties at the time) began shooting film. On a trip to Nepal with him in 2022, I was seduced by the oh-so-cool old-school build of his Canon AE-1. The sound of that shutter. The mechanical feel of it. The beautiful, dreamy images that were developed soon after. “Yeah, I want a piece of that”, I thought.