A Beach an A Night
It was a colorful evening on that beach : purple sky, orange sunlight, and green sea. Grass and sands and huts mixed it up with its green, white, and light brown color. I hopped out of the motorcycle, and along with my friends we jumped in into one of the huts in that beach – Sayang Heulang, Pameungpeuk, Indonesia.
Inside the hut was everything. I noticed bags, broom, sofa, table, playing cards, guitars, even rice, grilled tunas, forks and spoons, glasses, all were scattered pretty bad on the wooden floor, like sardines which is being harvested. And still, I can add some more to keep everything messier : dusts, thermal bottle, plastic, and banana leaves. And although banana leaves was considered an unique thing – a substitute for dining plate, I thought it messed up every things. The hut was, in a gentle way to say it, a happy gathering. One or two guys tried to fix it up. They swept the floor, and they put all things in order. Another celebrates the gathering by throwing their bags into the floor. It wasn’t my first time experiencing messy environment. In fact, almost every tourist my age is messy.
I stepped out of the hut, and made my walk to the sea line. The wind breezed strongly, as if I was on a hill storm. Clouds filled the sky, and I couldn’t see the sunset clearly. Was everyday on this beach always like this? I wondered.
“No,” a local person, Tri, answered my question. “Even if it is the time for the sea line to arise, the wind was never been like this before.”
I noticed that Sayang Heulang was a name of a beach when I reached Pameungpeuk, a small region southern of Garut, which is well known for its beautiful beaches. I never know that Pameungpeuk has many beaches – in fact, I thought Pameungpeuk as the name of a beach, not a region. Due to the bad weather, I was curious to go to the beach, enjoyed the wind, sometimes far out on the ocean, high tides showed up. I thought that it would reach the beach, but it never was.
Our hut was surrounded by others. On ours left and right was a restaurant. It wasn’t so deserted, I thought. Whenever we felt hungry, those restaurants can serve us any food. Far to the north, there were other huts, as so to the south. Motorcycles and cars appeared sometimes, leaving their tracks on the sands. The only road was sands on this beach, and rocks and dirt on the entrance which I noticed by the existence of a ticket box and trees surrounding the road itself. Outsiders have to pay Rp. 5.000 to enjoy the sunset, or the winds, or swim, on the beach, and Rp. 3000 for the local people.
Not for long that night appeared on the beach, and it was dark. The sky was black, as what exist in crayons, markers, and I even thought that the sky was painted by board markers. There were no stars seen, no moonlight, and lights from the huts didn’t give any solution to reveal the darkness. I see night sky in my entire life. I remember on the city the sky was rather grey or dark blue. On my mother hometown it was dark blue filled with stars, but seldom had I seen the one that was black, and it was never been as black as that. I lied on the grass, and I couldn’t tell whether the sky was near in front of my face, or far beyond the universe. Everything was empty, and everything was black. What I noticed then were chuckles and laughter, and guitar strings, and songs that came out of my hut.
Local people usually do the fishing on the night, but I wasn’t sure that they went on that day due to the strong wind. Not until I saw what resemble torchlight for me far on the sea. At first, I thought that it could be ferry ship or else. But this beach has no harbor, thus eliminating the possibility for it to be lighthouse, too. If I was an extremist, I could refer it to be an UFO.
“Yes, they are fishermen. They went fishing,” a local said to me when I asked what the torchlight was.
“Isn’t it dangerous to go fishing on this bad weather?”
“I guess,” He answered “But things wouldn’t be as bad on the sea as it is here on the beach,”
People there refer fishing activities as ngobor, which literally means “lit a torch”. They gone fishing at night and each of boats would use torch light as their source of light. I wasn’t sure though, whether the fishermen really use torch to guide them. The beach isn’t located on a remote area: I guess even people on the remote area nowdays know what flashlight and petromax (kerosene powered lightbulb placed on a special tube) is, and they knew how to switch them on. I wondered, then, that ngobor wouldn’t be done by torch nowdays. The fishermen must be using something more modest, and ngobor, I guess, is what the tradition made. That is, the word ngobor was invented long time ago when the fishermen still use torch when gone fishing, long before flashlight and petromax is familiar among them.
Somehow I wondered how my life would be if I had born as a fisherman. Perhaps I have to face the strong wind and the black sky – something which I terrified most on the beach that I wondered whether I was on the afterlife just by gazing the sky. I imagined standing at the ship’s starboard side on a stormy night. Lightning strike the ship and the tide shake it. I could end up died on the ocean, or landed on a deserted island, like Chuck Noland on Cast Away.
The cards were passed, the guitar strings were picked, and the song was sung once I back to the hut. As tourists my friend and I talked about everything: college life, daily life, everything. Some of them make fun with their girlfriend. “That was a disgusting view,” said Tri who, among my friends, a local people. It was uncommon in Sayang Heulang, as so as in Indonesia, to flirt with their partner in front of public. Sayang Heulang is not USA, or English, or France or Germany, whose people can flirt whenever they like. We as outsiders are supposed to respect the hosts – one of which is by not flirting in public.
“I am ashamed by what my friend was doing. Perhaps I would be judged as a person who doesn’t respect my culture,” she added. Indeed, flirting in front of public was impolite to the people. Yet this day thing seems to have changed. A couple would flirt anywhere in big cities like Bandung, Jakarta, or Surabaya. Values and norms in Indonesia have changed.
Thievery was a hot issue to be discussed in Sayang Heulang. That night, our friend motorcycles’ were parked outside the hut’s bamboo-fence. Rizky, my friend, also a local, warn us to get our motorcycle inside the fence. Otherwise, it would be on a verge of being stolen. Inside the hut, where our friend resided, and laughed, and chat, he announced:
“Guys, would you please take your motorcycles in? I’m afraid it would be stolen.”
But until everyone went to sleep, no one put their motorcycles inside the fence, so Rizky and I had to watch it for the entire night. When everyone slept inside the hut, we had to deal with the strong wind on the front yard of the hut.
No security officers guarding the huts that night – there were people passing by, but you couldn’t really tell whether they were officers or just local people, or even a group of thieves. Thieves would say they were the security guards or fishermen, and what we need to believe when dealing with that kind of situation is trust, which sometimes fail us. We have to defend our belonging ourselves.
“What a jerk,” Rizky said. “I really don’t want to wake up the entire night just to babysit these motorcycles,”
On some occasion I saw a car passed by. It went north, and faded. Then it appeared again, from north to south. I care not a thing on the car until Rizky told me something:
“Watch the car. They could grab the motorcycles, put them into the car,”
“How could?” I asked.
“It is a new trick used by thieves. The backseat of the car has been modified so that only the front seats exist, thus leaving more room on the back. They drive their car near the abandoned motorcycles, and bingo, the motorcycles’ gone,”
“They carry the motorcycles inside the car?”
“Yeah,” he ended the conversation. After heard what he said, I went into the hut, picked a thermal bottle filled with warm water, a bedog – sundanese for machete, and a glass.
“Just in case,” I said.
Rizky then told me not to go outside or inside the beach at night. The entrance was a suitable place for thieves to hunt their target. I thought so, since the entrance was covered by bamboo trees and surrounded by bushes, with no light.
Spend the night while guarding the motorcycles was not an easy thing. We wanted to sleep, yet no one put eyes on the motorcycles. But I thought that, after all, most teenagers are always like that. They are rebels, they don’t want to be controlled, and they are free. And so, spending that night on Sayang Heulang beach was everything. It was frustrating, curious, and full of discovery, and adventure.
