Last Friday was Nyepi, a Balinese Hindu-oriented national holiday which Jogja doesn’t really celebrate, so I headed to Sundak beach on the south Java coast with Rachel, Hector, and twelve of Rachel’s students, all Indonesian boys around 19-24 years old.
The road conditions were four hours of this:
…for views like this:
…white sand made of buffed-up coral, like this:
…plus a sunset like this:
…all meticulously captured by twelve Indonesian smartphones:
The boys made a sandpit fire and cooked a full chicken, plus sambal and rice:
…and rooms at the beach’s inn were too expensive, so we rented large mats and planned to sleep on the sand. Once it began raining, we dragged everything under a bamboo shelter, the boys yelling “Abort! Abort!”. Everyone fell asleep playing with their own smartphones, a far cry from ghost stories by the campfire, though people believe very strongly in ghosts here so maybe that’s for the best.
I woke up at 4am and noticed the clouds had finally cleared enough for incredible stars — the Milky Way, first sighting in Indonesia. Two of the boys weren’t sleeping either, so we sat together and watched the sun rise over the Indian Ocean.
As if this wasn’t all enough fun, here’s what happened around 7am:
Happy Nyepi!
mcljava 