Bali

Two weeks in Sumberkima Beach and the golden weather continues!

It has indeed been a quieter week with fewer touristy things, more beaches, and M0ses’ birthday. Our original plan for his birthday had been to take the ferry over to Java and walk up Kawah Ijen for a glimpse of the famous "blue lava” (in reality, blue flames which are a result of hot air combined with sulphuric gas emissions). We missed out though! A series of small earthquakes close to the volcano led to increase in alert level, which means a wider exclusion zone at the summit of the mountain. You can’t see the flames from further away so the trip was off. The guide is hopeful we might still be able to go, but if the alert levels are anything like Ruapehu’s it would be pretty unusual for it to lower in the next fortnight.

The back-up birthday plan was to take a boat out to a desert island close to where we’re staying and have a picnic afternoon tea there. We made a rookie error though and agreed to have prizegiving (ie gift opening) after breakfast instead of our usual family tradition of just before dinner. His birthday presents included four books, and given he’s been a bit starved of reading material all he wanted to do for the rest of the day was rip into them. By lunchtime he was onto his second book and we knew the boat trip wouldn’t be happening. I made a disaster of a cake out of packet brownie mix ‘cooked’ in a frying pan over a pot of boiling water, as we don’t have an oven. After about an hour and half it still wasn’t cooked so I flopped it onto a plate anyway and covered it with instant whipped cream (made from another powdered mix) which was truly as bad as it sounds. I disguised the pile with sprinkles and candles and wafer biscuits and M0ses gobbled it up quite happily! His assessment was that it tasted as good as last year’s cake, go figure. He chose dinner at a restaurant we’d already been to although he wanted a better seat this time to catch the incredible view, and was pleased when he got the absolute best seat in the house. Happy birthday M1ggy M0ses!

We did the boat trip out to the desert island the following day instead: Gili Putih is a tiny comma-shaped lick of sand which looks like it would quadruple in size at low tide. In a curious twist it’s white sand, unusual in this area of black sand beaches. It was super shallow close to the island which necessitated a long - and slightly stressful - walk from the boat in knee deep water, trying to watch out for sea urchins and starfish in the seagrass. On the island itself there are a couple of banged up old shelters, a swing, and a bamboo frame which looks like it would be very romantic if you had some mosquito net curtains to hang from it. For the most part we had the island to ourselves! And now we know what we’d take if we were ever marooned on a desert island: ice for our drinks, and more snacks - ideally not the “mystery flavour” chips I had chosen. It felt strange to have such a perfect little atoll right next to such a busy fishing hub - we passed lots of floating fishing huts on the 10-minute boat trip and there was a lot of fishing boat traffic. The locals were probably wondering what on earth was so terrible in our lives that a tiny bit of sand in the middle of the sea was so appealing.

We are still getting to grips with food here. You may be aware that at home I like to keep a very full pantry at all times. The first thing I do when I arrive anywhere new is head to the supermarket. Here, we couldn’t find a supermarket. We found small superette-type shops that carry a similar kind of range to a large service station in NZ. We found fruit stalls. We found warehouse-type shops that carry home goods with a limited range of groceries. We found shops with unlabelled bulk bins full of ingredients I don’t recognise. The absence of an oven here is a further complication. This has been quite daunting for me. I can’t feed the kids snacks all day, and they’re pretty good with tasting new foods but this is all new and they’d mostly prefer to eat things they’re familiar with. Let me tell you, we are eating a lot of eggs! We also found a tiny bakery where they hand make all the daily bread themselves in the heat and their wholemeal bread is delicious…. but getting there in the car is tricky. So yeah, we’re not starving, but the whole issue of food is a work in progress.

This is an area where marine conservation efforts have been in place for a while and are having some tangible results. We all borrowed snorkelling gear at Pemuteran beach and flippered out to have a look at the Biorock coral sculptures. What a cool thing! It’s a coral reef restoration project where steel frames have been laid on the seabed inside the bay as a base for new coral to grow. Then they run a low-voltage solar-generated electrical current through the structures (you can see the solar panel in one of the pics) which sounds odd - and how on earth did someone think to try that? - but has been proven to accelerate coral growth by up to five times, and even reverse the decline of previously damaged coral. A small piece of existing live coral is planted onto the structure, and the electrical current causes a chemical reaction creating a limestone-type coating on the steel which helps the coral to stick. Within a ridiculously short period (months) the coral takes root all over the whole structure and inevitably, marine life returns. We were really impressed. Just as impressive, they carry out regular beach clean-ups and have bags available for anyone who feels the urge to pick up the rubbish they can see. There are no public rubbish bins in Bali (unless there are but we don't recognise them? Very happy to be contradicted here!) so this was refreshing. We did our bit.

We’re nearly a month into our trip, and halfway through our stay at Sumberkima. I had thought we might be bored here; we’re not. It’s wonderful.Read more