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When planning this trip I had drawn up a kind of bucket list of things I wanted ‘to do’. One item was to find a beautiful deserted bay in Indonesia and camp on the beach, and man oh man had I just found that beach. 

The previous evening I had arrived on Sumbawa by ferry from Lombok and cycled 50km south to find a bay that I had seen on google maps, and what a beauty I found.

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The journey here had been pretty hard as there is no real road to the beach and I had ended up pushing my bike over a few headlands before seeing this beach in the distance.  I had arrived and set up my tent under some trees just as the sun was setting.

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The following morning in the daylight the bay that I had found was even more stunning than I thought when I had seen it in the twilight the previous evening.

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The first order of the day was to get a brew on and to make breakfast.  I decided that I would put my Robinson Crusoe skills to the test and instead of using my petrol stove I build a fire instead using driftwood that was on the beach.

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I had enough food to last me 3 days – porridge and pot noodle but I only had a couple of litres of water with me so unless I found a water source then I would have to leave after just one day.  This dilemma was sorted over breakfast when a farmer who owned the field that I had crossed the night before to gain access to the beach wandered over to say hello.  Well, hello in a sign language kind of way as he spoke no english, and I no Indonesian.

He asked me to follow him back down the beach to his field where there was a house.

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What  he wanted to show me was a water butt that he had in front of his house which was now full of water from the heavy rain that we had had the previous day.

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He said that I could use it if I wanted and he pointed to a well which was a t the other end of the field and showed me where he kept a bucket and rope under the house that I could drop into the well if needed.

He showed me the inside of the house and it was split into two halves – one section was the ‘kitchen’ which consisted of 3 stones on the ground where you could rest a pan on top and burn wood underneath, and a second room which had a mat on the floor and a mosquito net hanging from the roof. He gestured that I could use it if I wanted to.

My water issue was now sorted and in the water butt there was enough water for me to drink and shower for the next 3 days.  I’m not sure if the man lived in the house or just stayed there from time to time as over the next few days I only saw him there a couple of times and never saw any lights at night.  I thanked him and then went back to my camp to finish breakfast.

After breakfast, I spent the rest of the day doing precisely nothing except lying on the beach in the shade of the tree and taking the odd swim.  Apart from the farmer I saw nobody for the rest of the day.
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At about 5pm it was time to get set up for the night and this is always the busy part of the day when camping as at 6pm the lights are turned out and you are left in total darkness.

The first order was to head over to the farmers hut to refill my water bottles and to take a shower.  Once this was accomplished it was back to the camp to get dinner on and to collect drift wood for a stonking fire in the evening.

Dinner that night was my favourite staple of ot noodle with an extra packet of noodles to bulk out the calories.  I had thought about increasing my repertoire but the last time I had looked in the shop all I could find was tins of sardines and I am not a great fan so gave them a miss.

In the trees where I was camping there were ants nests and the ants were crawling everywhere.  They were all over the outside of my tent but so far had not found a way in.  A couple of them had slipped in with me as I unzipped the tent to get things out of it but I could live with that as long as the thousands that were crawling over the beach stayed there.

Only once on this trip have I come across biting ants and they are nasty.  The ants on this beach were friendly enough and once you got used to the sensation of them crawling over your feet and legs then they were no trouble.  Every now and again one of the brave souls would make it all the way to your nether regions and then it had to be dealt with.

Once food was out of the way and the washing up done in the sea it was time to get the fire lit before the sun set and darkness fell.  I went and collected a couple of hand fulls of dried grass from the farmers field and once lit this would act as the catalyst to light the rest of the wood.

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In quick order I had a roaring fire going and sat back in hope of a repeat of the sunset that I had seen the previous evening.  This was my only disappointment of the day as the sun set without lighting the bay in crimson red.  Never mind as you can’t have everything.

I carry a speaker with me on this trip which I can bluetooth to my phone and so a very pleasant evening was spent lying next to the fire and watching the moon light ripple on the waves on the ocean while listening to some mellow tunes.  A beautiful end to a beautiful day.

The next morning the sun rose in the sky at it’s normal time of 5am and that was my signal to start the day.  As I had done nothing at all the day before today would be a chance for me to go a wandering and explore the bay and so after breakfast I set off down the beach with a bottle of water.

At the other end of the beach I had an amazing view of Mount Rinjani that I had climbed on the next door island of Lombok a few days before.  From this distance away you could really appreciate the size of the volcano:

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While I was at the beach Mount Barujari, which is the active volcano inside the crater of Mount Rinjani became a little more active when it erupted sending an ash cloud 2000m into the sky.  Thankfully, all of the people who were climbing the volcano at the time and porters / guides were okay, and one quote from the government was that some tourists did not immediately heed warnings to leave because they wanted to take photos or videos of the eruption….. (Read this news report – Mount Rinjani eruption)  I did not see the eruption and as I had no internet connection and I only found out about it when I got back to civilisation a few days later.

Back at the beach I headed around the headland at the far end of the bay and although the subsequent bays were nowhere near as large as the one I was camped on they were no less beautiful.

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The only drawback with camping at the beach is that I don’t have a lot of suntan cream with me as I only carry a small tube of factor 50 that I tend to use on my nose.  When I am cycling a wear a cap under my helmet which protects all but the tip of my nose from the sun.  Here at the beach there was a fair amount more exposed flesh and I would end up peeling in the coming days, which I hate, but being ginger in the tropics is something that I have to deal with as I even in an english summer I get burnt if not smothered from head to toe in factor 50.

In the afternoon I wandered back to my camp to get some food on and after a 5am start, and all the walking in the sun, it was time for a siesta on the beach.  I had found a remedy to the rampaging ants that were on the beach – my sarong was too ‘hairy’ for their little legs and they kept getting stuck on the edges and never made it to the middle where I was lay.

My evening that day was a repeat of the night before – a shower around 5pm followed by dinner and a fire as the sun went down.

The following day I had a bit of company in the morning as 3 local surfers arrived to surf the breaks which were at either end of the bay.  They could only be surfed at high tide as they broke onto the reef which  was exposed at low tide.  There was definitely a mix of experience out there as I had a ringside seat of the nearest break and a few times one of the surfers was sent cartwheeling through the air as he mistimed the wave.  Still, practice makes perfect so they say.

When I was cycling through Malaysia, Ramzul, Diana and the kids had joined me for a day of cycling and a BBQ at Air Papan beach.  When they had left they had given me 4 ration packs and I had saved one for a special moment somewhere along the way.  So, my last dinner at the beach would be Chicken Rendang served over instant noodles:

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Apart from these 3 surfers and the local farmer, who popped by to say hello now and again, I never saw another soul for the 4 days that I camped under the trees on this deserted beach.

Here is a video I shot of my time there:

On the fourth day I had run out of food and it was time for me to pack up my tent and retrace my tracks back north as the road south eventually became a dead end.  This was my final view of the bay as I pushed my bike back up the track and over the headland.

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On my way back to the tarmac road I passed through a few fishing villages and the main industry seemed to be seaweed production.  In the bays there were hundreds of lines where the seaweed was cultivated and then brought ashore to be dried.

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Here is a link to an article that I found about seaweed production in the area – Poverty watch: When fishing is tough, village finds seaweed farming lucrative

The other constant companions on the road were herds of goats that I have passed in virtually every village that I cycled through in Sumbawa:
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My time at the beach had ended and the next few days would see me covering 100+ km per day as I continued my journey east, which is something I had not done since Thailand.  The difference here was that it would be through the mountains, and so I knew that I would have a few tough days cycling ahead of me. My few days of solitude at the beach had been the perfect preparation for the adventures which lay ahead of me in the the mountains.

Thanks for taking the time to read about my journey as I continue to pedal my way through Asia.

Cheers

Stewart

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The beach – Sumbawa
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