BAWEAN ISLAND

Bawean Island - Indonesia

Di tulis Oleh: John and Paula.

Bawean proved to be an easy place to arrive, a huge bay with gently shelving sand bottom, there was reef down the sides but it was clearly visible and there are usually a handful of fishing boats, resting up during the night, which give a good indication of where to anchor. There was one yacht already in the bay but anchored much further out than we wanted to be and as we arrived the fishing boats were heaving anchors and departing. We found a good spot in sixteen feet of water; it seemed a nice calm and generally protected anchorage with the bonus of having a little cooling breeze. Bawean was bigger than expected, more mountainous and certainly more tropical; green hillsides stretched away in the distance.

Paula was ready to go ashore even before I’d got the anchor secured….. we had an urgent mission to undertake, things had gone amiss in the communications department!

On arrival in Indonesia we and many others, had purchased a Modem with SIM Card for our computer and a telephone SIM Card for our mobile phone, even at the time of purchase it was not strait forward to get the system operational but the telephone people in Kupang did work very hard to ensure that all the yachties that signed up, were operational before leaving. Before arrival we’d been told to get a Telkomsil Modem as this was guaranteed to work throughout Indonesia, this we failed to do and ended up with a modem from SpeedUp….. At the time there was little choice but at least this one had ‘Intel’ and ‘Apps Store’ written on it so we at least suspected it would work on the Mac; which it did. At the time of purchase we were told that the Modem would work only for three months; why that would be the case we don’t know and what happens on the three month anniversary….does it burst into flames and self-destruct???The Telkomsil SIM card that we bought for the modem had a sticker on the back saying “Area Bali Nusa Tenggara”…. So once passed Bali, was this destined to fail??? All these questions and no answers, primarily because we couldn’t find anyone who really understood the system and anyone who had any idea…. could not translate it to English. So we were headed ashore in search of enlightenment!

It was nice not to have been besieged by local canoes on arrival and even nicer that we could land ashore on the sandy beach and still not be hassled….. Things were looking up! We started off down the road into town, which we had noted in the next bay west as we arrived; someone had told us that you can get a taxi for this journey but during our time ashore we saw nothing resembling such a beast or even something that could be adapted for that purpose. It was not such a long walk but in the hot sun, it was enough; I guess the more adventuresome could get a lift on the back of a passing scooter and some cruisers have hired motorbikes here and done tours right around the island, we have had reports that it is quite beautiful!!

Arriving in the village we were surprised by the obvious wealth in the area, not all but most of the houses were much more ‘up-market’ than we had been accustomed too. Intricate and ornate designs, grand porticoes and very fancy wrought iron railings, all well painted and kept in good order; there was a fairly new Mosque of grand design with a gleaming dome bristling with loudspeakers. Unfortunately the village had very few shops and there wasn’t much to buy in any of them……another paradox. We did however find a Telkomsil agent and he did speak enough English to get us fixed up with a new Data SIM and top up our phone; it later transpired that he didn’t understand the system either and we didn’t actually need the new SIM…. It was our ‘promotion’ that terminated in Bali, not the SIM or the Modem…. It turns out that the various promotions on which most of the equipment is sold are area specific so you may lose a service or a special rate for calling if you move out of that area; the equipment however, still functions.

That was our mission completed….. We couldn’t find a Magnum (ice cream) so we returned to the dinghy and the boat; On the way, I found a few things to shoot with the camera….The paddy field stretching away to the low mountainous centre of the island, the deep green paddy fields along the small river that runs into the bay and the shady road that meanders to the village. It could have been a picture postcard perfect place except it wasn’t……. We went ashore with a bag of plastic rubbish and we returned to the boat with it having found nowhere that we could leave it and feel we’d done the right thing.

It seemed to us that the local government had made a conscious decision NOT to do anything about refuse….although it may just be that they have their heads in the sand, after all, they never had to deal with all this garbage before so why spend money on it now? Just a few years ago, when there were no plastics on the island (and probably little or no imported products), it was enough to throw out the garbage for the pigs to eat and other biodegradable matter could be tossed into the dry river bed for the rains to flush out when they came each year and rejuvenated the island. This kind of thinking was OK then but is NOT going to work in this new world of today; I have to say, I have not seen anywhere as bad for rubbish as this place since we left Jamaica. It was disgusting!!!!

They are hard at work building an airport just across from the anchorage and I’m sure that this is at least partly to do with tourism….trouble is that by the time they are ready to get the tourists in, there won’t be anything here that is worth seeing; people do not fly thousands of miles to snorkel amongst the plastic bags and diapers, nor do they want to stand knee deep in garbage when taking photos! Then there’s solitude…..I may have got it wrong but I do believe that tourists pick island getaway’s for a bit of peace and quiet. I have looked through the Koran and I could not find any reference to the wholesale destruction of peace and quiet on earth in making the ‘call to prayer’. I do believe that each person should be allowed to worship in any way that person sees fit, so long as it does not disturb or embarrass any other person….. This not being my country, I wouldn’t want to suggest that the call to prayer should be ‘modified’; I just want to point out that from a tourists point of view, once the novelty factor has worn off, the call to prayer can be disturbing…..

The anchorage in Bawean is well away from the village, there are just a few huts at the end of the beach road in the eastern corner of the bay, thus we were rather surprised when the call to prayer blared out to us; I think they were calling the guys over from another island. If it had been in anyway melodious it would have been bearable, however it seemed they were getting the young kids to make the call, sort of a training exercise; the result was a screeching sound that was enough to make varnish peel! Yachties, like tourists, have the ability to vote with their feet and this we did the next morning…. The 0400hrs rasp was enough to drive even the most ‘hardy’ away!

“We should not be here”!!!! You don’t have to be any sort of a weather guru to make such a pronouncement; sailing ships have been passing this way for hundreds of years and the rules of the game are quite simple. To get to ports inside the Malacca Straits, you must leave Darwin by the middle of June and go like hell….. NO stopping to smell the roses!!! So here we are, two months behind sensibility, the ‘change over’ season is so far gone the NE Monsoon is taking a hold off Vietnam and Bangladesh and the favourable currents, that were so important to earlier voyagers, have turned against us. The leg from Bawean to Belitung turned out to be 374 miles and there was no way we could motor it all, thus we knew before we departed that we’d have a tough job on our hands and we’d need a lot of patience. The wind howled (mainly out of the north) at all of six knots for most of the five days that we were on passage giving us an average speed of a little over three knots; needless to say, patience wore thin and we still managed to motor almost seventeen hours!