Palau Kramat - the bad

The ‘weather’ continued through the night and into the morning. The swell was gentler than at Gili Air (so less being rocked to sleep) but the wind was busy - we had the cabin moon roof open so it varied from seeing stars to rapidly battening the hatches when a rain squall hits! Monsoon season !

By late morning the conditions had calmed so we took the tender onto shore. From the yacht the beach looked idyllic, but on arriving we realised that it copped the brunt of the currents meaning plastics!

This stuff doesn’t come from the resident/s onshore - it travels hundreds or thousands of kilometres!
If there is an upside - which I doubt- there was a huge amount of ‘ghost net/rope’ as well as delights like plastic cups, shoes, debris, straws, and goodness knows what else.

The ghost net/ropes aren’t a good thing, but I wanted to find more to use in art projects, so we set about collecting some. The predominant colours of these ropes and net were blues, aquas and greens - a perfect representation of the waters in this region (at least when it isn’t raining 😆).

Unlike the rope we found in the Komodo region - short pieces, easily pulled out of the sand and flotsam, these were massive entwined bundles of rope, net, organic debris and plastic trash. There’s no way I could remove pieces. Ever-obliging, Dale jumped back in the dinghy and motored back to the yacht for a knife, then helped me retrieve a sackful.

One of the most distasteful items we saw lots of on that beach were disposable nappies - dozens of them from newborn size to toddler sizes. Clearly the ‘convenience’ (scourge) of disposable nappies has reached Indonesian communities too, minus the education on how to dispose of them appropriately.

Other common items were plastic tumblers with peel off foil lids (you see these at Warungs here everywhere - holding water, juice, flavoured drinks; shoes - lots of things, slides, crocs, joggers etc; skincare & toiletry tubes, fishing floats, lures and so much more.

We saw beautiful things too - lots of great shells and coral, and hundreds of sea urchin shells! So delicate and pretty.

Further along we checked out a few structures we’d seen as we approached the island. It seems that there had been a small resort or similar here. The infrastructure was rather too opulent for it to have been a local village. Whatever it had been, it appears to have been destroyed by the sea. All that remains is a concrete path, a couple of large circular tiered structures, a ruin of a concrete building with a (elaborate by Indonesian standards) bathroom, a ruined wharf, and strangest of all, a Venetian style bridge curving proudly over a large drain pipe!

I tried to research what had happened here, but to no avail. All I could find was that in 2008 the Indo government had a vision of allowing development on this and the adjacent Gili Beso, to attract foreign visitors to rival the Gilis (T, Air and Meno) off nw Lombok. It seemed to be that the structures we found would have been older than that. A mystery!

There was much more to this day, but I’ll post separately due to photo upload limits. Stay tuned.Read more