Krakal

I love everything about going to the beach. I love playing in the waves, sun-baking on the sand, climbing the cliffs, perusing the rock pools, making sandcastles and sand sculptures and scouring the beach for shells. I love the salt water, the fresh air, and I even love how sand gets everywhere so that for weeks afterwards you'll open your bag or the boot of your car and still have remnants of your trip in tiny granular form.

This weekend, ACICIS (the organisation I'm here with, the Australian Consortium for In-Country Indonesian Studies) organised a trip to Krakal beach for all the ACICIS students who wanted to come along. We left Saturday morning, stayed overnight before heading back late Sunday afternoon. There were about twenty of us, and we all piled into this bus which pretty much epitomised all buses in this country. Indonesian buses are an adventure in their own right. It takes two people to drive an Indonesian bus; the driver, and the guy who hangs out the doorway yelling (or in our case issuing one of the loudest, most high-pitched whistles I've ever heard) at anyone being overtaken. On public buses, this guy will take money, shout for potential passengers amongst pedestrians as the bus hurtles down the street, and instruct the driver when to start and stop. I'm not quite sure what else the guy was meant to be doing, but he seemed to do it with gusto. The bus also flew along with all the doors and windows open, which was a little unfortunate when it started to rain, which it tends to do a great deal here. With the windows open and the green countryside whirling past, the cramped seats and hot weather didn't seem so bad though.

The hotel we stayed at was, in my opinion, a pretty ingenious place. The whole 4-storey building was built into the side of a big hunk of cream-coloured volcanic rock, so every back wall of every room was this porous slab of rock. Apart from the odd one-legged cricket and various other specimens of wildlife, it was a fairly nice, clean room. Unfortunately though, the porous rock proved do be the undoing of one of my friends.

In Java, the main island of Indonesia and the one I'm living on, there is a legend about a goddess who lives in the South Seas. According to Wikipedia she's actually celebrated on April the 6th (my birthday) in a little town in West Java. I think that might almost be worth a trip. Anyway, Nyai Loro Kidul is said to be the Queen of the South Seas, and it is also said that she is angered by boys who wear green. Anyway, so my poor friend Matt went all the way to Bali last Thursday to pick up a new surfboard. He flew back with it on Friday, and brought it with him to the beach on Saturday. After an hour surfing, he came back to shore with a piece of his broken surfboard in each hand. Then, later that night while we were playing cards outside his room, someone went to use his bathroom and came running out seconds later saying there was a flood. It turns out that a waterpipe had burst right behind Matt's room, and the water had leaked through the porous volcanic rock right onto his bed and all his things. And what colour board shorts did poor Matt bring to the beach that weekend? Bright green.

Anyway, the rest of the trip was incredibly relaxing. I did all the things I mentioned above, as well as playing beach cricket and talking to some Indonesians who were holidaying on the next beach. I tried to get them to join in playing cricket, but they were content watching us and calling things out. I really enjoyed looking in all the rock pools. There were some very disturbing wildlife. Instead of boring you with joyful descriptions of their unusual physical characteristics, I'll put up a few photos.

Thanks for tuning in!