Java's Premier Beach Resort
Trip Start
Aug 29, 2010
1
10
18
Trip End
Nov 06, 2010
Pangandaran, Indonesia
Thursday, September 30, 2010
However, the locals love this beach town! Every weekend buses roll into town and all the hotels up their prices, hawkers trawl the streets with food carts and buckets of fish; the temporary tattoo stalls have queues of customers and the beach side stalls and warungs are packed. At 5am I peered out the window and thought it must be mid-morning: families sat out in the hotel's drive way, people zoomed about on motorbikes and the beach was filled with hundreds of people swimming and strolling! So, we weren't exactly enamoured with the town (dubbed Pain-andaran by Matt) so we planned some day trips to entertain ourselves.
With some German girls we met on the minibus, we joined 5 others for the Green Canyon day tour. Along with our wonderfully charismatic tour guide, Wawan, we headed off in motorbike convoy to a village where they make palm sugar (from the sap drained from the palm tree flower). We watched the process of making it, tried various sugar products and learnt that no part of a coconut goes unused! The villagers de-husk the coconut, separate the coconut water, flesh and husk - all for selling.
Next we headed along a coastal road to a turtle rescue centre. Here turtle eggs are brought in from from the beach, kept warm and hatched. When the turtles are 3 months old they are returned to the sea. Additionally, any injured turtles (often caught in fishing nets) are brought in for treatment. It's all run on donations and after cooing over baby turtle, we made a small donation. Next we rode to the Green Canyon - the area's main tourist attraction, only after some torrential showers it was actually a chocolate canyon! Instead of sparkling emerald river and canyon, the boat traveled along a brown river...still it was wonderfully relaxing. We couldn't enter the canyon to swim as the water gushing from the waterfalls made it too rough to enter.
Next we drove to Batu Caras, 32km from Pangandaran and a pretty beach spot. We had lunch and swum in the sea for a good hour! It was a lovely day, finished off with a walk across a rickety bamboo river bridge! Perhaps we were a bit harsh on Pangandaran and it has had a rough time lately: In 2006 a tsunami hit the coast and killed 600 people in the town (our guide Wawan broke his leg), and many beach-side hotels had to be rebuilt. I think that accounts for the haphazard feel - and the many tsunami evacuation route signs we saw all along the coast. It's just a frustrating to see a place with so much potential left dirty and beaten down.
Right, I can't bear to write about the madness that is Jakarta today, I'll leave that for another day!
