Roworejo

Some people told us about a „secret beach“ that should be close to Red Island. Denise and me decided to spend one day at the secret beach since it should be one of the most beautiful beaches of the region. Even if there were different descriptions of the path we should take and of the duration it would take us to get there, we just took off with a rented scooter and followed the description of the woman who borrowed us her own scooter for a few hours (obviously there is no official renting station in the Red Island village😅).

We parked the scooter, went past a fish market and a lot of cute kids who wanted to talk to us in english. We arrived at a small Harbour and asked the fishermen for the path to the secret beach. They couldn’t speak English but pointed to a hill next to the Harbour and demonstrated hiking movements. We wanted to take the path they showed us, but there seemed to be a river between us and the path on the hill - the fishermen demonstrated that we would have to cross it first. We shrugged our shoulders and went through it 🤷🏼‍♀️😄 before we left the men seemed to try to communicate to us that from 4 pm on the water of the river would be as high as our chest - so probably it would be better to be back before that time 😅 our sliders were so muddy when we came out of the river, but luckily our clothes didn’t get wet.

On the other side of the river two locals showed us the beginning of the „path“ on the hill. It was very muddy and overgrown with plants. We had no idea how long it would take us to go to the beach but we did understand that it should be one or two kilometers to hike across the hill. We actually immediately lost the path but luckily the two locals somehow came with us (even if we didn’t ask them to and even if they couldn’t communicate with us at all😁 but somehow they must have understood (before us) that we could never find the way on our own)… the uphill hike was all the time muddy, slippery and full of undergrowth. There were many times where we almost fell. We had to start to go barefoot at some point… I was switching between swearing the whole time (we just wanted a relaxing day at the beach and didn’t expect this muddy hike at all) and laughing very hard about myself 😅

The nature was amazing (we saw coffee plants ☕️😊) and after about one hour of muddy hiking (😮‍💨😂) we finally reached the secret beach which we then learned was called Wedi Ireng 😊 but since we knew that the river would start to rise we didn’t have much time left, so we went swimming and had to start our hike back (still together with the two friendly locals who were kind of guiding us 😅).

On our way back ( I would have never found the path on my own 😅) we suddenly heard a voice coming from one of the coconut trees. We looked up into the tree and saw a man right on top of the palm tree 🥥🌴 he could speak English and said that he wanted to invite us to his house for a coconut. He was climbing down (so quickly!) and showed us a small hut in the middle of the palm trees, where his wife sat and prepared what we learned would be palm sugar in the end. They were so friendly and gave us two fresh coconuts (the coconut water was so good! Maybe especially because of our exhausting hike in the mud 😅).

It was not a big surprise for me that the water of the river had already been risen until chest height when Denise and me arrived at the river. I already prepared for getting changed into my swimsuit, but one of the fishermen saw us and picked us up with his boat to drive us to the other side of the small river 🙏🏼

Back home in the village we heard that walking to the secret beach is just not really recommended during rainy season😄 to conclude, it was a very muddy discovery tour and we expected the day to be totally diffrent but in the end we met many super friendly locals and also learned some things about the nature and people in Java 🤷🏼‍♀️😅Okumaya devam et