Pangandaran

The beach resort community of Pangandaran is only about 3 hours further to the south and east past Tasikmalaya. So Utari & I decided to go for the weekend (Fri night to early Mon morning). I had really considered shifting our work in Tasik to Tuesday and spending an extra day at the beach, and I am so, so grateful that my workaholic tendencies won out. We left Pangandaran at 6:30 AM and an earthquake occurred about 9 hours later. A tsunami slammed the western side of Pangandaran. The town is on a narrow isthmus off the southern Java coast, in the SE corner of West Java. It has a large, forested national park at the headland. The whole town is just above sea level. I’ve heard estimates of 3-6 meters for the height of the tsunami. So far, I think there are about 350 confirmed dead.

Some of you will soon be getting cheery postcards written out at the beach. I felt weird sending them.

Sigh.

We had a really, really nice time in Pangandaran. We stayed in a teeny hotel—not the nicest place I’ve ever stayed in. But it was pretty clean, the rooms opened onto a little garden, the owners were really sweet and it was on an alley between the 2 main drags, about 2 blocks from the entrance to the national park and a few blocks from the fish markets, restaurants, etc. So it was pretty quiet, except when the mosque across the street was blaring the calls to prayer at a truly ear-splitting volume. They gave us breakfast, which we didn’t realize when we booked the room. Coffee/tea, toast, hard-boiled eggs and, each morning, an entire pineapple cut into the shape of a flower and sliced. Yum. And it was really cheap.

The eastern side of the isthmus had no beach, pretty much. There was a big retaining wall down the whole length of the town and a few areas to land boats and pull out fishing nets. The western side was the swimming beach. Black sand, nice waves. It was crowded, but not unbearably so. I saw a few guys in trunks, but the only 2 women I saw in bathing suits were westerners. A lot of the women swam in long pants, long-sleeved shirts and veils. And I saw several people walking down the beach in jackets and sweaters. It wasn’t as hot as I expected (not like Jakarta), but coats?!?!

I ate a lot of seafood: shrimp (with the shells still on…surprisingly good), crab, squid and fish. I think I gained back all the weight I lost while I was sick and then some. Sad.

On Saturday, we went to see a big international kite festival. Sat was smaller, mostly Indonesian kites. Sunday, we discovered too late, was the day that the international teams rolled out their huge, really fancy kites. Oh, well. In the afternoon, we went to the national park and wandered around. We did it sans the local guides, who will take you into the areas of the park that are supposed to be off-limits because they were getting trampled. No, thanks. Saw the barking deer and a mess of gibbons. The monkeys are really naughty…people tease them and feed them all kinds of crap, so they’ve gotten really bold. As we were on our way in, a large male ran right up to me, jumped up onto my messenger bag, and tried to take my water bottle. No way, man! I yanked the bottle out of his hands and he ran away. Over the course of the afternoon, we saw a lot of people feeding the gibbons peanuts, chips and all sorts of other crap. Didn’t see many birds. (I’ve been using my Indo bird guide to ID people’s pets…lots of people have pet passerines, usually in small cages. Sad.)

We browsed through some of the junk shops, too. A lot of t-shirts, a zillion temporary tattoo stands, and other usual beach junk. There were a lot of people hawking shells, chunks of coral, etc. Taxidermy is big: I saw small komodo dragons, a lot of fish, and a disturbing number of turtles, some of them quite large. Should have taken pictures. Really, really sad.

On Sunday, we did a Green Canyon day tour. They take people in groups of 4 to see a few local industries: people who make coconut palm sugar, wooden puppets (both of which we saw), tofu, and shrimp crackers (neither of which we saw). Then, they take you to the Canyon for a boat ride up a river (through the canyon, which is indeed green), and at the end you can swim almost all the way up to a waterfall. Gorgeous. Then, it’s off to a nearby beach for lunch and lazing about on the beach for a couple of hours. A really nice day.

Monday was back to work early. At the time I was not particularly jazzed; in retrospect, though, it was a good thing that we left. Sad.

Photos: wayang golek (wooden puppets, usually characters in traditional Indonesian and/or Hindu stories); I loved the motorcycles crossing the bamboo suspension bridge; pulling in a fishing net.