Teluk Kumbar (sometimes Gombar) in Malaysia's Penang State for a dinner at a sea-front restaurant yesterday, I snapped these two magnificent sunset photographs
There are some great beaches out this way (see Padang Bai, below) but the beaches along the coast at Candi Dasa are fighting total disintegration with massive concrete walls that hold back the ocean at high tide. When the tourist area was being developed from a small fishing and farming centre the off-shore reef was seen as an easy and convenient source of lime for cement and mortar. The subsequent explosions and burning of the coral destroyed the reefs and with them went the natural protection from the strong Lombok Strait currents leaving the new hotels in frightening danger of simply falling into the scouring sea. What exists now is a sort of pretty, man-made series of groynes and breakwaters that splash up into bridal veils of foam and spray as the waves run along them, but the only sand to be found is very coarse and tucked only into the corners of the protective works.
The exclusive beaches of the Nusa Dua enclave are not spared despite their exclusiveness. The raking and sifting are done more vigorously perhaps, and opposite the larger hotels the inter-tidal sea floor has been scoured of its allocation of broken rock and dead coral, but the need to mark out these safe areas with ropes and buoys spells out a different story about the un-cleaned areas.
Litter is always a problem along these beaches facing the Indian ocean. At the worst times it seems that every country from South Africa, the Middle East and past India and Java has up-ended their refuse trucks into the strongest of the ocean currents that run past their shores and all of it winds up along this hooked coastline of Bali. Even out west past the popular surfing beaches of Canggu, around the island temple of Tanah Lot and as far as Soka Beach, some 40 beach kilometres from Tuban, plastic drink bottles and ends of rope and twine can be found up the creek entrances, tangled around the roots and branches along the banks.
The beach at Tuban, on the northern side of the airport runway that juts out into the sea, is sheltered by the off-shore reef and therefore very safe and especially child-friendly but it is often scarred by small beds of dead and broken coral that are not kind to the feet. Not so frequently these days, but often in the past, pollution of the soft brown rock kind (read 'faeces') in dark water was also a definite deterrent.
