Gede Homestay

location (Google Maps)

this place really sucks bad. You know what I mean?

Dolphin Tour

We didn't bring a camera. I figured I'd probably drop it in the water, but really I wanted to have the experience without the bother of thinking about digitally capturing the scene. It's such a bother sometimes, most-times.

All the boats are designed very similarly with only a few tweaks here and there, hewn from a single tree, dug-outs, about two feet deep inside. Arched outrigger supports held with lynch pins and blue poly-whatever rope binding. Most boats are painted white like ours. Curious, one of our bamboo outriggers is painted white and on our right side it is pink. I think we've all seen pictures of boats like these. They had names painted along the full length, “Morning Star” with a website URL. Some names are Indonesian, most are English, some names advertising a local hotel or restaurant, some with aggressive names, implying speed and strength, which I have forgotten.

We had four other passengers, all of us single file in our dug-out. I sat in the back, just in front of the engine, was quite noisy, as you might expect from a 10 HP lawn mower engine, and Pat in front of me. You can image removing the engine from your riding mower and attaching a seven-foot extension rod on the end of the crank shaft, and stick a six-inch, four-blade prop on the end of that. Set the engine in a steel swivel bracket with a pivot pin on the bottom of the bracket, so the crank extension sticks out the back and the engine is on its side. The pin goes in a hole in a two-by-six, attached crosswise, just ahead of the pilot, and is lashed with more rope. You've probably seen pictures of these motors used in South East Asia on small shallow draft sampans.

Our pilot sits perched above all us passengers at the stern. He's a young man about twenty-five with a “Billabong” T-shirt and long pants, both worn from daily use for untold months, but probably washed every other day anyway. Kind of like us, traveling light.

There must have been sixty boats like ours as we came abreast with the rest of the dolphin seekers, Asians and Westerners alike. Pat said it was worse than Disney. The boats were milling about in a semi-orderly fashion, avoiding collision, in search. When a school porpoised there'd be a race among the nearby boats to get close, the closer the better is seems.

We did see quite a number of schools, at lease ten, small schools of less than twelve, darker gray than Florida dolphins, probably eating breakfast. We were all out there as the sun was just coming up through a dark cloud mass. You could see a smoke layer across the strait coming from Java to our west, and behind us on Bali to our south were two volcanic peaks ringed with clouds.

For the return trip our motor crapped out a few times, once to refill the tank. Each time our pilot would adjust a carburetor screw restart the engine and turn the crew back to its original position. Just before we reach our place I spy two very large boats on shore, resting on the sand just like our twenty-foot outriggers, but these guys are forty-feet long with twenty-foot beams and no outriggers. These must be for the big boys fishing, yet there were a dozen or so fishermen using outriggers just like ours, or with lateen sails, setting trot lines on our way back. These big boats had engines just like ours with the long extension prop shaft, but probably three or four cylinders, and really long shafts, reaching below the 4-foot freeboard. I had to look really hard from our distance to convince myself that the engine rigs were such.

The sun was two hands high and in our eyes as we head east, the Java smoke seemed to thin out on our two-mile return trip, but to our right is Bali, a narrow black sand beach, capped with a string of family operated hotels, too many, and occasional rice terraces. The hotels are backed up with the first layer of tree covered volcanic hills, maybe 1000 feet ASL, and behind that are the 7000 foot active babies, like the one that wiped out the neighborhood in '63, treed nearly to the top. Pak Gede, our homestay owner, almost died of starvation during that time; we are the same age. Most of the boats have already landed, ours must have been the last out and the last in. We can see those already landed in clusters of ten or twenty along the shore, every quarter mile or so, as we continue eastward. Our landing point is the eastern-most of all but one, and our pilot uses local cell towers to navigate, where his father probably used the signature of the hills.

Nice to be back at the hotel for a breakfast of coconut and banana filled Jaffles, fresh fruit, and black coffee.

As an aside, looking on the web you'd think there are no more than ten hotels here.  There must be fifty anyway.  My advice is look around.

Traveling

So, two nights in Bondowoso, with day two spent climbing Gunung Ijen, then one night in Jember.  That was a pretty swanky place with a private balcony overlooking a small courtyard one story below, and walled in all around and up one story above, palm trees and koi fish ponds with water streaming from fountains.  Very nice furniture, glassed in shower and separate bathtub.

Yesterday we arrived in Banuwangi, and today we walked outside the hotel compound (this too is a pretty special place), and down to the shore to see what we could see.  Of course, few tourists venture this way, and we were greeted with smiling halo's, that's Bahasa Indonesia for hello, and "asli dari mana" - where are you originally from.  And as usual the great surprise when we say we're from America, when it is assumed that we must be from Holland or Australia.  Probably for the reason that we are speaking Indonesian, and secondly, most of America thinks Osama is still lurking behind every tree in every Islamic country, so there are no, American tourists here, none.

And tomorrow morning we get on a 45 minute ferry ride across the strait to Gilimanuk, Bali, where we'll hopefully meet Ketut, the son of the hotel owner to give us a one and a half hour ride to the hotel in Lovina Beach, on the northern side of the island, away from the south and east where most tourists go, where Osama lurks.