East to West...: Beach

Korea celebrated Chuseok last week - a sort of Thanksgiving, involving family celebrations and lots of food. So of course, English Village emptied out for the week as teachers used the enforced vacation to see anywhere outside Korea, which curls itself into a little ball of traffic jams and closed stores and refuses to do anything to entertain us.

I cannot quite tell you of the frustration of our last hour at EV on Friday, nor of the joy as we climbed into the taxi at 5pm, abandoning our co-teachers to another hour of meetings, the refrains of "it's greeeeaaat, it's fun, it's English Village" ringing in our ears. Checking in at Incheon Airport and boarding our plane for Bangkok... all the bureaucratic pleasures of finally getting out of the Village properly: our first holiday in six months.

I sit beside a large Korean man on the plane. Most of my six hours in the air I spend trying to send him telepathic messages that covering one's nose with your left hand does not then make it acceptable to pick said nose with the right.

The messages don't reach him.

Half a nap later, we're descending into the intricate network of incomprehensible lights that is Bangkok "asleep". It is 1am Thai Time, and we have a 7-hour layover ahead of us. Cait, Leigh and I find a Starbucks hidden down the end of one of the hundreds of Bangkok Airport's alleys. Here's a hint if you're ever stuck there - bypass all those hard, uncomfortable rows of chairs. Buy a $3 cup of tea at Starbucks. Curl up on one of their big comfy couches and sleep deeply for 5 hours, with not even a murmur from the staff. Beautiful.

The next morning - 9am in Korea, 1am in London, 7am in the airport - we track down Robyn and Liam, curled up on a bench at the departure gate for our flight to Bali. Having hugged them, I can now start to look forward to the other part of this trip: BALI!

Before it can be reached though, there's still a 4-hour flight and another time zone jump. We land at a pretty little airport. Yep, that's right, I used "pretty" and "airport" in the same sentence. Arrivals Hall is a little remniscient of the old Harare Airport with its peeling paint and plywood counters, but the large windows look out over a water garden crowned with a red earth temple, ornately decorated with complicated towers. Through customs we're met by a driver from our hotel, Guntur, and hustled past coconut trees into his minivan. The 1.5-hour drive through the capital and up the east coast reminds Robyn and I of Harare, with busy little kiosks and empty vleis. The more arid landscape of the south gives way quite suddenly to thick jungle and rice paddies, blue seas stretching out far beyond where the horizon should be.

Our 'hotel' is completely overpopulated by huge trees; we wander down a narrow path past little Hindu statues, offerings of flowers and palm leaves laid before them, to a thatched house: a bedroom up steep steps, downstairs an open-air lounge, and an equally open-air bathroom.

We spend a lot of time in the lounge area - in fact Robyn, Liam and Leigh all end up spending a night on the mattress down there, where it's a bit cooler than the room.

Dinner is at the restaurant up the road, where we sit on the verandah and snack on nasi goreng and chicken satay. Bintang beer is discovered to be far more to our liking than the standard Korean fare - plus, at $1 a bottle, I'm not even sure how the manufacturers afford the glass... :)

Enormous waves crash just at the end of the property, beating up the smooth volcanic pebbles that make up the beach, for no other reason but to create the soothing sound that accompanies our after-dinner verandah chatter.

The musical surf accompanies us to sleep too.

Wow.

That's all. Just wow.

We wake up early to the sounds of birds chuckling in the trees outside our windows. I stroll down our little street to buy cigarettes and water and at 7am the warm smell and pale smoke of cooking fires fills the air. The little Spaza shop is open, and the tiny, elderly woman (actually, "tiny" is redundant - all Balinese women are clearly made on a different scale to the rest of the world's women) - she's all smiles and talk, what do you like, these ones? have one of these biscuits, nice, aren't they, where are you staying? Ah! with Lembot? And you are loving Bali!

That last is not a question but a mere statement to clarify the facts. Balinese are very proud of their island and heritage - well, who wouldn't be, waking up to this environment every day? Damn, I've only been here a day, and I'm proud of the place! Breakfast on the verandah starts with Balinese coffee, a very worthy cousin of the more famous Java, and then pancakes - green with herbs - cooked, our host proudly puffs his chest out, in a traditional Balinese manner - and stuffed with banas, syrup and coconut. A plate of various fruits, chopped up and beautifully arranged with a hibiscus flower, sits on the table too.

We're stuffed by the time we begin our day's adventure.

Today's schedule is to explore a beach. Preferably from the vantage point of a sun-lounger. Some sort of tropical drink should be positioned within reach of the left hand, the right hand being occupied with turning the pages of a book. All these and more are to be part of our first, busy day.

We turn down the offer of a ride from the lovely Guntur and set off down the bustling coast road, along which, soon enough, rattles a bemo, a tiny orange minivan which is the Balinese equivalent of the Zimbabwean commuter and South African taxi. We flag it down and settle onto wooden benches nailed around its inner cave. I wasn't kidding about it being tiny - Robyn and I, facing each other, touch knees.

We're greeted by the few occupants, and once it's generally agreed that yes, we are headed for Prasih, and yes, this van can get us there, off we go, bowling at high speed past rice paddies and villages, dodging the scooters and motorbikes that overrun Bali, smiling and waving at motorbike drivers. And at the wife sitting behind him. And the little boy standing in the footwell between his daddy's legs. And not forgetting of course the sweet dark-haired little girl, jammed between her parents. And we can tell they're smiling back at us because not one of them is wearing a helmet. This destination is not recommended for weak-hearted British Health & Safety officers on holiday...

We're dropped off 25 minutes along the road, and make our way down a winding side lane to the beach. The 20-minute walk is lovely, through forested hills and past tiny farms, where women in conical straw hats bent over vegetable gardens raise their heads and call greetings to us as we pass, and sleek, tan cows and their miniature calves munch at the lush vegetation, self-absorbed to the tips of their pointy hooves.

The beach, when it slides into view from around the edge of a hill, is a gentle curve of tan sand stretching between two rocky outcrops. Palms crowd at the back of the beach and the line between forest and sand is marked with a colourful fleet of fishing boats. At one end, four or five thatched restaurants offer wooden sunloungers in front.

We choose one arbitrarily and settle into our little patch. The waitress comes and offers us freshly-squeezed pineapple juice. The sea is a bright turquoise blue and is rough at each end, by the rocks. In the middle is a relatively calm bit and this is where we swim. We have to choose our moment though, judging the right time between big waves to run out and float past the breakers. With uncanny timing, right after our first swim an old man approaches us with a fresh coconut, which to my delight he hacks open for us with a little machete, pops two straws in, and hands to us for a mere $1!

Sunlounger? Done. Fruity drink? Got it. Sand, sun and evil coral reefs? Done, done and... well, done. My second swim, I misjudge a wave and am royally and unequivocably dumped. As I go tumbling round wildly in the broiling sea, I remember that this is why I don't swim in seas with waves... Just before I'm finally able to swim up to the surface, I kick my feet out and graze some coral; I decide I've swallowed enough salt water for now so I retreat to lie on the chairs and inspect my wounds. They're not deep, but are very painful, and because they're grazes rather than clean cuts, all sorts of sand are making a home inside... We do the best we can with various stores of antiseptic handwash, wet wipes and seawater.

Lunch is served in the restaurant - "in" probably being the wrong word for what is essentially a few tables and a thatch roof plonked on top of a section of sand. I have grilled mackerel and manage very well, despite having to use those knife and fork things again... I was just getting the hang of fish and chopsticks!

For dinner that night, we've preordered king prawns at the restaurant down the road, from our hotel so, with my injury bravely limping on, we head back to town. We barely make it through the pile of grilled and battered prawns that's set before us, never mind the rice, salad and fruit.