pacitan

ok, i’m gonna make this quick (relatively) because i’m in the midst of packing for sumatra. it’s currently 9 pm and i’m leaving at 4:45 tomorrow morning. wah!

anyways, i wanted to catch ya’ll up on my last trip before i head off on the next one. i went to the beach for 3 days with 14 indonesian friends. i had some apprehensions, what with being the only whitey and the only non-native indonesian/javanese speaker. but it went well. or as well as any vacation with a bunch of asians can go. after just 2 days, i came home with 739 photos on my camera alone. and EVERYBODY else had their own camera too! they just liked to use mine because it’s fancy. also, we woke up and started laying on the beach and swimming in the ocean every day - AT SUNRISE. yup, that’s right. a cup of tea, and catch some waves.  indonesians like it early. a weird adjustment. for me, vacation means sleeping in!

ok, so a few quick takes of highlights of the trip.

1. you know how if you stand in the sand at the edge of the ocean, the waves wash over your feet and you sink a little each time? i’m not sure of the science of this, but the waves cause the sand to shift just enough that you slooooowly sink down into it. i like to see how far i can go down before a wave inevitably knocks me over. the second day of our trip, i was buried up to my ankle balls (what is that protruding joint called anyways?) when i noticed something – i could feel a pulsing in my feet. my first thought was that i had awoken some giant turtle sleeping beneath the sand that was about to eat my legs off. but almost instantly, i realized that i was feeling the pulse of the earth. in fact, it took me several more waves to realize that what i was feeling was actually MY pulse due to the sand pressing down so heavily on my feet. but for about 1.5 minutes there, i was completely in awe – i could feel life flowing through the earth. creation was living and breathing and i could feel it! even after i realized it was my own pulse, i wasn’t too disappointed. because after all, i AM creation too. i AM living and breathing and life IS flowing through me. and that is equally as awesome.

2. and speaking of sand, a couple days while i was laying out on the beach catching some rays, i could hear sand crabs tunneling underneath my ear. they  make funny little grunting sounds; the kind of noises i make in response to people when i first wake up in the morning. so i started talking to them! if i grunted twice, they would do it twice back. if i did it three times, so did they. and if i did it one time, they responded in kind. it was cool. i just prayed they wouldn’t bite my ears. and that nobody would see me laying facedown in the sand grunting to myself. oh, and you should have heard them go nuts when my stomach started growling! i think they thought it was the crab god speaking to them from above.

3. we drove 2 cars to the beach. kind of like this one (i got from the internet, but the photo interestingly enough appears to be taken in indonesia):

anyways, there’s the driver and passenger seats in front, and then a row that seats 3 (or 4 if you squeeze) in back. then in the VERY back, there are 2 little rumble seats that fold down from the sides. that’s where i rode the 5 hours there and back, mostly because everybody in my car gets carsick except for me. so i was happy to curl up with the luggage and get some rest since i woke up before 5 AM every day. anyways, one day we were driving to a different beach further down the coast, and one of the people in the middle had their window cracked open a few inches. the rest of the windows were tinted a bluish hue and they were quite dirty, so the contrast between what i could see through the open window and what i could see through my window was vast. through the open crack, the trees were VIVID green. but through my window, they were ugly brown/blue in hue. it made me think about how i see the world. what if there are brighter colors than what i can see even through the open window? what if my eyes are like the tinted, dirty windows? what if i’m somehow missing out? seeing things through tinted eyes? and then i realized that we are ALL like that. and that won’t go away until we get to heaven, when imperfection fades away and all things become perfect. it gave a new meaning to 1 corinthians 13:12. this world is but a dim reflection. it made me think of heaven in a different way than i ever have before…

4. navita: everybody is staring at you.

me: welcome to my life.

navita: wow.

5. even though we live in an imperfect world, some things come pretty darn close! here’s some pictures from our beach weekend!

(the beach at 7 AM… so THAT’S how it looks at this hour…)

(this took a long time to do properly…)

(a second beach we visited)

(so this is the hotjaga i always talk about. and his lovely wife.)

(with all the huge waves crashing, it was quite a chore to keep my camera lenses dry!)

(natural bridge. i hiked up and sat on top of it!)

(the whole group)

(the view atop the land bridge. the peninsula looks like a dinosaur!)

(waves crashing below me)

(sunrise over pacitan)

(yoga on the beach at sunrise)

(looking down into the biggest known cave in southeast asia!)

(another of all of us. again, it took forever to get it right!)

(“take my picture by the ocean!…… NOOOOOOOOOOOO….!!!!!!)

(i love the beach!)