It’s raining out, hard. Yesterday was hot and humid as hell – I went downtown mostly just for the wind on the motorbike ride there – and now it’s all falling from the sky. Ibu Marice read me the Noah’s ark story in Wamesa on Saturday (actually, she spent almost two hours reading to me from a bible badly translated into Wamesa, copyright Amsterdam 1915, but more on that another time), and on days where it rains like this it becomes awfully easy to envision that happening literally. So while I wait for it to stop so I can walk to school, I’m going to write about going to the beach.
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| Pantai Amban |
We’ve already pretty well established, I think, that I’ve
got rather a thing for sand and salt water and fish, particularly the big,
colorful, and/or oddly-shaped ones – the amount of money I’ve spent going
diving in the last few years is a little ridiculous. So is it a coincidence
that I’m out here doing my fieldwork in basically the most biodiverse marine
region on earth? Maybe. I certainly didn’t choose it consciously. There’s
something about Papua that just invites speciation and diversification – and
there’s no internet right now, since I’m not at school and even if I were the
wifi usually goes down when it rains, so these numbers may be totally off, but
if I remember right – it’s second only to the Amazon in terrestrial diversity;
the Raja Ampat islands, where I’m going in November, have something like 75% of
the world’s coral species and a crap-ton (scientific term) of fish and pelagics
– promotional materials from the resort claim a record of 374 fish species
sighted on one dive; and roughly 12% of the world’s languages on an island
about the size of Texas, which is more per capita than anywhere else on earth.
Trust me on that last one, I’m a linguist.
Which all goes to say that if you show up at a beach around
here with a snorkel and stick your face in the water, assuming it’s clear
enough to see anything, you’re gonna see some pretty cool stuff. Hopefully that
stuff doesn’t include a saltwater crocodile, ’cause that can happen. But so far
at least it hasn’t. To me, anyway.
So. Sonja, a linguist from Germany working on the Yali
language, was until yesterday staying in the same house as me, which has been a
huge plus for many reasons, not least because she’s been here often enough to
know all the good deserted beaches and has a motorbike to get there. Manokwari
proper has a popular beach called Pasir Putih (literally ‘white sand’, but it’s
crowded and dirty enough that there’s nothing putih about it. We visited deserted
beach #1, Pantai Amban, on Sunday, my first day here. It’s about a 10-minute
drive out of town, then two minutes down a pair of dirt ruts and you’re on the
beach. The pros are that it’s empty and flat-out gorgeous, the cons are the
sandflies, so it’s better to stay in the water and leave quickly when you get
out – no lolling in the sun here. Supposedly they sometimes harvest (mine?
poach? remove.) sand here for use in projects elsewhere, but there was nobody
working when we went, probably because it was Sunday. But the sand there is a
dark grey, and the water is warm, and there’s a gentle swell, with palm trees
on shore and a village a ways down where two guys were dragging a fishing net
into the water. The whole scene is more or less stunningly beautiful. So we
floated and chatted and swam and relaxed for about an hour, then drove back
home to wash off the salt with a cold mandi before dinner. Unfortunately I
didn’t have my camera.
Beach #2: Pantai Bakaro. (Pantai means ‘beach’, in case you haven’t gathered.) Thursday
afternoon Sonja suggested we head off early from work and go for a swim.
(Though at 4:30 it was only half an
hour early; that’s how irresponsible we are.) This time I brought my snorkel,
and we took the 20-minute motorbike ride out to the village
of Bakaro. The drive itself was
half the fun, passing through villages and swathes of jungle, with sago gardens
and cows and pigs by the side of the road, and once a pair of baby goats in the
road, possibly the first time out here I’ve seen goats standing on the ground
rather than on a bench or a wall or something. (Little-known fact: Goats like
to climb.) Pantai Bakaro is apparently a hotspot on weekends, and a bus was
pulling out when we got there, but late on a Thursday afternoon we basically
had the place to ourselves, along with one guy out in the water with a snorkel
and another with a spear gun looking for dinner. The sand here was rough and
white rather than fine and grey, made mostly out of ground shells and coral.
When you see that gorgeous picture going around facebook of sand magnified x250
and it looks like a lot of beautiful pieces of shell and glass, it’s this kind
of sand, not the Pantai Amban kind. And the reason it’s made of shells and
coral is that’s what’s under the water, along with all the pretty fish that go
with it. (Aaand the power just went out. Lovely.) There’s almost no waves at
Bakaro, and no sandflies, but lots of sand crabs darting between their holes up
on the beach and their lunches in the water.
There were nearly no
waves, and the visibility was good, which was lucky because there were plenty
of fish to see. I recognized a school of sergeant majors, parrotfish, some
clownfish hiding in anemones, urchins, a sea cucumber, those little florescent
blue fish you see everywhere, those black/white/yellow-striped angel fish you
see everywhere too, and near the end a fair-sized red and white lionfish. There
was a good lot more that I didn’t recognize as well. Unfortunately, no camera
this time either.
On shore I collected
shells called mata bulan, moon’s eye,
a pretty little white circle with a spiral in the middle. So that’s what you’re
all getting when I get home. At that point the sun was getting low and the
water had turned opalescent, and the whole scene was just paradisiacal. Since I
didn’t bring my camera, you’ll have to take my word for it. It was a long damp
ride home, with a fiery orange sunset behind the Arfak mountains across the
bay. And it turns out dusk is a good time to be on a motorbike, since you’re
moving so fast the mosquitos can’t get you. So I count that as a win.
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| Pantai Amban |
Beach #3: Pantai Amban II. Sonja flew home on Sunday, so
Saturday afternoon we headed out one last time to Pantai Amban, this time
farther down where we hoped the sandflies might be less. (They weren’t.) The
waves were bigger here too, so even though I brought my snorkel there was so
much sand in the water I couldn’t see a thing. More warm water, gorgeous
vistas, swaying palms, et al, but this time I got photos. We got knocked around
by some of the bigger waves and ended up with that fine sand everywhere,
including in the crevices of my (happily waterproof) camera, so there was some
quality time spent later cleaning that out. I still haven’t gotten it all off
the bathroom floor.
Well the rain’s stopped, the sun’s shining, birds are
chirping, and the dove has brought an olive branch, so it’s off to school for
me. Maybe if I’m lucky the internet will be good enough this morning to get a
picture or two up. Here’s hoping.
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