A Little Treasure House Of Memories

Feb 19, 2010 , Straits Times


A little treasure house of memories

By John McBeth, Senior Writer
The beach house south of the western Java fishing port of Labuan was this writer's retreat for many eventful years. The land has now been taken over by a power station, but the house stands on a new site.
WHEN Indonesian President Susilo Bambang Yudhoyono inaugurated a new 600MW, coal-fired power station near the western Java coastal town of Labuan recently, my wife and I were particularly interested observers.

For the station stands on the very spot where we once had a weekend beach house and where we spent many happy times for the best part of a decade, entertaining ourselves and a stream of friends.

In fact, power utility company Perusahaan Listrik Negara (PLN) liked the house so much that officials took the trouble to move it lock, stock and barrel to a new site next to the project office, as a place for guests to stay.

Back in 1997, when we lived in a tiny mid-city Jakarta apartment, we felt the need for a small place out on the coast, somewhere where we could stretch out and spend long, leisurely weekends. Going to Bali seemed too time consuming at that point.

Carita was already a popular West Java weekend tourist resort, dating back to the colonial era, but we were looking for a location a little farther away and easily reachable in a two- to three-hour drive from Jakarta.

On one of many excursions, my wife and her sister, who is an architect, eventually found an old kampung house, sitting only metres from the beach just to the south of Labuan, a busy fishing port.

It lay where the Sunda Strait, separating Java and Sumatra, empties into the Indian Ocean - too far away to see most of the ships using the waterway, but in clear sight of the Krakatau volcano.

The small, uninhabited house was in terrible shape, with a leaking, moss-covered roof and rats and insects running everywhere. But we saw the possibilities and, after much debate, finally decided to buy it.

The first nights we spent there were not particularly pleasant, because there was no electricity and only limited cooking facilities. We also had to close the bedroom door to keep the vermin out.

Soon contractors tore it down as far as its concrete piles, which we used as the foundation for a new three-bedroom bungalow, built almost entirely of wood, with a loft and a broad verandah facing the sea. It was to become our retreat for almost every free weekend after that.

When the 1998 financial crisis struck, we took advantage of the depreciated rupiah to buy 12 power poles which, by prior arrangement, allowed PLN to extend the power supply as far as the house.

There were drawbacks, of course. On stormy days, waves driven by the predominant west wind would crash over the fence and surge as far as the front steps, making us wonder whether living there would become untenable.

There were also the times when a change in the tide would scatter the port's flotsam along the length of the beach in a great stinking mass of cans, bottles, old flip- flops and tattered items of clothing.

Although I was not there, we did have a home invasion by machete-wielding men who threatened the maid and my wife's ageing father and took off with an old discarded television set.

Our night security guard, a man with a criminal past himself, whose sons would help themselves to anything not locked away, was so affronted that he tracked down the intruders one by one and beat them up.

Sometimes, but not too often, we would hear loud booming noises. My wife thought it was from a construction site, but it wasn't long before we realised it was Krakatau in one of its periodic bad moods.

Our front yard was full of buried pumice, a constant reminder of the devastating 1883 eruption and the accompanying tsunami which burst along the shore - our shore - and killed more than 36,400 people.

Earthquakes were even more common. After all, one of the world's most active fault lines - the one that caused the tragedies of Aceh in 2004 and Padang last year - runs parallel with the coast of the Indian Ocean.

There were many good times - and some of the most vivid and amazingly colourful sunsets I have ever seen in Asia. Our clever black mutt, Licorice, liked the place too, learning to surf the waves among the bamboo fish platforms that lay in the shallow water offshore.

One of my fondest memories is of thousands of giant fruit bats lifting off from their refuge on the small forested island in front of us and beating their way inland in search of food. Against the golden glow from the setting sun, the sight was almost surreal.

Then there was that birthday party when I got four microlite pilots, led by a rather mad Australian diplomat, to fly in from the sea and drop water bombs on the surprised guests standing on the lawn.

The wife of the United States military attache thought it was a terrorist attack, but she should have made the connection with the Flight Of The Valkyries, which we slipped into the tape deck just before the raid.

It was only when we decided to sell the house in 2006 and find a place in Bali that we were informed the land had been chosen for a power station. So there was our proud little house on television the other day, acting as the backdrop to the inauguration ceremony.

It made us feel pretty good, frankly.


Questions

1. Describe a memorable event that happened in the past.

2. Describe an interesting stay at a holiday resort.

3. Would you prefer to live and study in another country or in Singapore? Why?