A Quiet 9/11 - Medana Bay, Lombok Island, Nusa Tenggara Province, Indonesia

Harmonie
Don and Anne Myers
Fri 1 Oct 2010 03:48
08:21.698S  116:07.700E
 
We hopped over to Medana Bay, site of the next official Sail Indonesia rally stop, from Gili Air on September 11th.  We admit that we held our breath on that day, hoping no new nastiness would erupt on nearby Bali Island or anywhere else in Indonesia or the world for that matter.  Luckily, all was calm and even the call to prayer didn't seem as loud as usual that evening.  Medana Bay is a beautiful spot with a perfect view of Lombok's mountains, including the huge brown rain clouds that develop every afternoon in the peaks and sometimes slide down over the bay.  The local family running the Medana Bay "marina" had it all going on.  Well, mostly.  They paid the local kids to clean up the beach for our arrival (knowing how much we foreigners hate a trash covered beach), put in a sturdy dinghy dock (quite a step up from the scary rickety contraptions we'd unloaded ourselves onto previously), and put in a bunch of moorings.  Most of the moorings were too close to shore and too close together for the average 45 foot rally boat, but we appreciated the thought they put into the moorings as we anchored a fair distance away from them.  The marina owners also constructed a pavilion and small kitchen where local ladies prepared a set menu for dinner every day at the low, low Indonesian price of 25,000 rupiah, or $2.50.  We had the best nasi goreng ever there - sticky fried rice and crispy green beans flavored with shallots, hot pepper and garlic, all wrapped up in a thin layer fried egg, and surrounded on the plate by decorative splashes of several different very tasty sauces.  Local artisans and hopeful sellers of trinkets were allowed to set up stalls on the beach between the dinghy dock and the restaurant pavilion, but all must have been told not to pester the boaters too much because there was no hard selling going on.  Even the kids must have been told to stay away from the boaters' dinghies because although they spent every afternoon jumping off the dinghy dock into the water, they left the dinghies alone.  Medana Bay was a very nice spot indeed.  We stayed only three nights - long enough to go on a short tour and catch up on boat jobs.  We didn't stay for the official rally festivities because we wanted to maximize our time in Bali, our next stop.
 
Picture 1 - Medana Bay with Lombok Island's mountains and afternoon rain clouds in the background.
 
Picture 2 - The local market. Aha!  So this is where all the fruit and vegetables have been hiding.  Lombok is a very fertile island slathered with lots of good volcanic soil, so the produce is plentiful - a nice change from the barren Komodo area.  In this picture, Mohammed, our tour guide, is helping Sue and I pick out the best tomatoes.  He assisted with the bargaining process too, but we're pretty sure we paid the top tourist price anyway.  Not that top tourist prices amount to anything more than a dollar or two, but someday we'll have to find out what the locals pay for a kilo of tomatoes, just for grins.
 
Picture 3 - Plowing the fields the old fashioned way.  Our tour took us to the northern part of Lombok Island where there were plenty of farmers doing lots of plowing without the luxury of tractors.
 
Picture 4 - A traditional Lombok Island mountain village.  The 400 people of this village support themselves through the cultivation of cashew trees as well as other crops.  This village is one of only a couple purely traditional villages near the north and west coasts of Lombok.  As you can see, their homes are constructed from bamboo and pandanus fronds.  Each family's home consists of three structures:  the parent's hut, a communal eating pavilion and the children's sleeping hut.  The row to the right contains the parents' huts.  In the middle are the covered raised platforms where the family eats and socializes together.  On the left (not shown) are the children's sleeping huts.  Everything was very orderly with straight dirt paths separating the parents' row of huts from the eating pavilions, and the same on the other side separating the eating pavilion from the children's sleeping huts.
 
Picture 5 - Our village guide standing in his hut next to the kitchen where the remains of a cooking fire sits on the floor in the corner, and hand carved wooden cow and goat bells hang from the rafters.
 
Picture 6 - The honeymoon suite.  This structure stands in the center of every parent's hut.  It is a raised and enclosed bed chamber, used only by newlywed couples.  What it's used for the rest of the time, we aren't entirely sure.
 
Picture 7 - The cashew fruit and cashew nut from a cashew tree.  First the cashew pod is extracted from the cashew fruit, then it is dried, boiled and subjected to a third process that none of us can remember.  At any rate, the process of producing a cashew is arduous and time consuming.  No wonder we pay big bucks for the final product.
 
Picture 8 - Our miniature kid parade in the traditional village.  Miniature because there weren't many kids and because their size was so tiny.  Cute, as always, just tiny.
 
Picture 9 - What's a reunion with Storyteller without at least one visit to a very fine resort?  We reunited with both Storyteller and Priscilla for the first time since Wakatobi several weeks before.  Lucky for all of us, this resort was a short walk down the beach from where our boats were parked in Medana Bay.  John and Sue, and Suzie and Tom opted to spend a day or two at the resort, but we went for the brief cocktail hour instead.  This was the first "real" resort we had seen in Indonesia (with plenty more to come later in our travels on Bali).  From the left is John, myself, Suzie, Sue and Don.
 
Anne

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