Padang Bai - Nusa Lembongan

The day dawned sunny and calm, and we packed up quickly to as to be ready for our 8.30am boat departure. Ceridwyn was experiencing stomach problems, and facing a potentially awkward situation (there was only one way to access toilet facilities on a boat of that size). We packed various delicate or electronic items in plastic bags and placed all of our luggage out the front of Topi Inn.

It had sounded too good to be true when the agent promised to bring the boat around to our hotel. We ended up lugging our gear across the beach. The boat proved roomier and sturdier than we first thought, and we settled down to enjoy the ride. The captain was a relaxed fellow, and spent most of the journey (unsuccessfully) trawling for fish with a hand line.

We skirted the fringing coral reefs and carefully made our way to Jungutbatu, the main town on Nusa Lembongan. Initially we had nobody to help us unload ourselves and our luggage but soon locals began appearing from everywhere. While we had our backs turned helping Melody and Skyla through the water someone had already picked up one of our bags. We knew they would ask for payment, and we would have preferred to carry our own gear but we needed someone to give us directions to Pondok Baruna (our next accommodation venue). I bargained one guy down to 20,000 Rp for carrying the bags, and then I realised that everyone else expected 20,000 per bag carried. I quickly snatched up the rest of our bags, and followed the first porter, who had taken the light bag.

Pondok Baruna is run by a UK couple, and is a base for the World Diving Company. We weren’t doing any diving, but the rooms were good value and backed straight onto the beach. There was always something happening on that beach. The conditions on Nusa Lembongan (very shallow water, high nutrients) are perfect for seaweed farming – a new crop can be grown there every 45 days. The work is very labour intensive, and there were always people gathering seaweed in boats, placing seaweed in baskets, carting baskets ashore, spreading seaweed out to dry. As per usual on Bali (and elsewhere) women are the main labourers.

You may wonder why people bother to harvest seaweed. A gum extracted from seaweed called carrageenan is used widely as a food thickener, and in particular to give ice cream its texture. The carrageenan reacts with the water in ice cream, making it thick and smooth, and stopping it from forming ice. Carrageenan is also the magic incredient which stops aircraft from icing up on runways.

As soon as we walked behind the line of tourist bungalows on the beach we found ourselves in a rural village. There were open spaces, almost like a town square, which I later realised were for drying seaweed. The scene was quite different to the mainland, as there was no rice production on the island, and fewer stone compounds – many people lived in simple woven shacks close to the beach.

After lunch Skyla and I hired some snorkelling equipment, and explored the beach at the front of Pondok Baruna. There was no bounty of fish as we had seen the day before, and I could see that the waves were breaking on the coral reef hundreds of metres out to sea. We swum out through the shallow water to the reef, saw a few fish and succeeded in getting ourselves scraped on the coral. Most of what we saw were seaweed farms, but these were quite interesting. Lines of string were attached to bamboo poles banged into the sea floor. Seaweed was growing profusely on the string, although whether this happened naturally or by cultivation I never found out.

In the late afternoon I went for one of my short walks. I went up the hill, turned left then right along a dirt track that I thought was part of a loop road. I ended up on the other side of the island, in a village that did not look as if it has seen too many tourists. There was a commotion as I walked past, and everyone asked : “Where are you going?”. We were often asked this, and were never sure whether the question was meant to be taken literally or was an equivalent of “how are you going?”. In any case I had no idea where I was, I had no idea where I was going, and I was confused about how I was feeling. Eventually I stumbled upon a main road and the town of Lembongan. It was getting dark so I swallowed my pride and found a motorcycle to take me back to Jungutbatu.

After the girls went to sleep we sat on the balcony and looked out to sea. There was a strange rumbling sound which may have been an approaching tsunami. Or, as we realised the next morning, it may have been the waves breaking on the distant reef.