Visits

Thursday, May 30, 2019

Matahari Terbit

Finally made it down to Matahari Terbit today, and, as often happens, my knack for picking the wrong day to go the wrong place manifested itself as I found myself in the midst of a perfect hoard of motorbikes--too late to turn around once you're in the stampede. The best you can do is keep moving with the flow until it settles down to graze somewhere, somewhere, in this case, being a grass and dirt lot off to the side of the main street. So it would be a walk just to get to the beach I had come to walk on. 

"What's the crowd all about," I asked a man as I moseyed long with the now dismounted crowd.

"Libur," he said. "School vacation." 

Ah. 

Anyway, I did my so-called exercise walk once we got to the beach proper and soon encountered an additional crowd, a separate herd, this one composed of tourists come to take the tourist boats out to the outlying islands, Lembongan, Ceningan, Gilli and so on, and found the usual chaos associated with this exodus in full gear as tourists tried to understand the directions squawking over loudspeakers, jostled in line for their boats and trudged into the knee-deep surf to board.

Matahari Terbit (which means sunrise) is otherwise populated with small food booths, sellers of sate and corn fried on the spot, miniature minimarkets selling whatever the tourists had suddenly remembered they had forgotten, candy for the children, and so on. This is also the beach often used for the launch of boats bearing the ashes of a loved one to be spread at sea.









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