For Good Friday, my church decided to go to the beach. We rented 2 buses, packed meals, and headed to the south coast for the day! Our plan was to hang out at Indrayanti Beach, but when we got there, it was high tide and there were tons of people swarming around the narrow strip of beach that was not covered by water, so we drove 20 minutes down the coast and found a much quieter Drini Beach. After spending most of the day there, we drove into Jogja and spent the evening eating and shopping in the famous Malioboro area of town. It was a loooooong day. I was at church, ready to go, at 5 AM. And we didn’t get back to church until 11 PM. Good thing I am awesome at sleeping in any moving vehicle! Here’s what the day looked like.
First, we spent some time at Indrayanti Beach worshipping and listening to a short sermon from an American guest speaker. For me this meant getting to hear a Good Friday sermon in my native language!
It was SUPER hot there! But Friday was a national holiday, so there were LOTS of people milling about, enjoying their holiday at the beach, undetered by the 100+ degree temperatures. It was interesting to see all the people checking out what we were doing, and several passerbys (can you pluralize that word??) of other faiths heard the Word as they stopped to listen in.
After our worship time, we loaded back up on the buses and drove to Drini Beach. When we got of the bus, I was wearing a swimsuit with shorts and a tank top on over it, plus a sundress on over THAT. But when we stepped onto the beach, I basically felt naked when I saw most of the women swimming there…
Yup. They were going swimming in chadars. So that was great. I kind of felt like I needed to be respectful. And hide.
Drini is divided up into two parts by this interesting… um… hill-type-thing conveniently located behind three of my friends who wanted me to take their picture every 20 seconds.
Did you notice the stairs?? So did we! And instead of swimming, we decided to climb to the top and see what we could see. The path to the top was pretty overgrown and really steep in parts.
But it was a short climb, and when we got to the top, this is the view we were rewarded with.
I hiked over to the very edge and found myself perched on a cliff overlooking the south sea. I love water and I love the way it crashes against the rocks and I love the sound it makes and I love the color it is and I love how strong it is. It is mesmerizing. I spent awhile there, sitting by myself, enjoying being alone with the ocean, and taking pictures of the birds flying low over the waves.
My friends started calling for me to come take their pictures. So I took a bunch of them, then explored around the top of the hill.
The beach kind of curves around this hill/rock/land mass that we were standing on. The extremely covered men and women were swimming to the west side of the hill (shown above), and most of the people from our church had wandered over the the east side (shown below). After we hiked back down, we went around to that side.
The water on the south coast is VERY dangerous and VERY strong because there are no major islands between Antarctica and Java to break up the waves or the currents. People drown there on a regular basis. I heard that someone drowned at Indrayanti Beach the day before we came, in fact. So people don’t really go to the south coast to swim, per se. More than anything, they play in the water. Everyone thought it would be great fun to stand knee deep in the water and make a human chain, attempting to hold each other up as the waves rushed in. I took several pictures and then eventually got in on that action myself! The water doesn’t look very deep, but it is SO STRONG – it’s hard to stay standing up!
This is my church, guys.
Happy Easter. : )
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