We arrived on Gili Trawangan from Bali curious to see what all the fuss was about.

And at first glance, it was easy to understand.

White sand, clear turquoise water, colourful boats pulled up along the shore and the mountains of Lombok sitting across the water in the distance. It was all very tropical and looked exactly as a small Indonesian island is supposed to look.

The Gilis are well known for diving and snorkelling, and the water around the islands was beautiful. Clear, warm and full of marine life, it was the sort of place where spending most of the day in or beside the sea seemed entirely reasonable.

Unfortunately, there was a problem.

Rubbish.

Lots of it.

The hotels and resorts generally did a good job of keeping the areas immediately around their properties clean, so from your room or your piece of beach everything could look rather lovely.

Walk a little further, however, and things changed fairly quickly.

Vacant blocks of land seemed to double as rubbish dumps, with plastic, bottles, bags and assorted bits of discarded everything piled up behind the more carefully maintained tourist areas.

It was difficult not to notice.

And even more difficult to ignore when some of it ended up in the sea.

At certain times, particularly as the tide came in, rubbish would wash back towards the beach. Trying to wade into that lovely clear water while plastic bags and assorted debris wrapped themselves around your legs rather took the edge off the tropical island experience.

Nothing says paradise quite like removing a plastic bag from your ankle.

It would be easy to blame tourism, and undoubtedly tourism contributes to the problem, but we had travelled through plenty of heavily visited places in developing countries where rubbish was managed considerably better.

What seemed to be missing here was a proper way of dealing with the sheer amount of waste being produced on such a small island.

Which was a shame, because Gili Trawangan really was beautiful.

The beaches were lovely, the water was warm and clear, and away from the rubbish there were moments when it looked every bit like the island paradise shown in the brochures.

But once you have noticed something like that, it is rather hard to unnotice it.

For us, the rubbish problem overshadowed much of what was otherwise a very pretty island.

There are a lot of beautiful islands in the world, and plenty I would choose before returning to the Gilis.

Perhaps things have improved since we were there.

I hope so.

Because underneath all that rubbish was a genuinely lovely place.