Sepa Island

 

 

Sepa Island.

by Graham Foss

 

Back in the summer of 2019, our holiday was a real adventure. Planned out meticulously by Ida, my wife, we spent two days in Dubai before heading to Indonesia, where the highlights of our stay there were a visit to the Thousand Islands and later a train trip to Jogjakarta. We really blew the budget in 2019. Little did we know we wouldn’t be back until 2022.

This story will focus on our trip to Sepa Island.

 

The Thousand Islands (known locally as “Kepulauan Seribu”) are a group of islands just north of Jakarta, the capital city of Indonesia, situated on the populous island of Java. If you care to look it up, you will discover that there are actually only 342 islands and only 11 of them are given over to tourism.

That was where we had decided we were going to spend the next few days. I should point out at this stage that my wife is Indonesian, our three children are mixed Indonesian / Scottish and in this year, they were aged 11, 10 and 6. This was our golden age for travelling with kids, where everything was at children’s prices, and their combined cuteness was at its zenith.

We were destined for the Sepa Island Resort. Google it if you dare, it is still doing business at the time of writing and still looks incredible, a vision of paradise that brings back happy memories as I write this on a storm wracked December night in the Galloway hills five years later.

Our journey began in Ciputat, a district in southern Jakarta. Our driver, whom I lovingly referred to as “Deathwish Ricky” picked us up in the morning and drove us at breakneck speed along the toll way to where we would ultimately get on the boat. I sat in the front, Ida was in the back seat with the younger ones so she could keep an eye on them, and my eldest was in the rearmost seat with his grandmother (or eyang).

We arrived in plenty of time, and everyone except me had breakfast at the pleasant dockside cafe. I had a notion that the boat ride would be at least an hour and did not trust my innards on a vessel that likely didn’t have a toilet onboard. While we waited, the kids played with some friendly stray cats that they named Wacky Blacky and Turtle-top. There are stray cats in every street in Indonesia, semi-feral fellows that are tolerated by the locals. At Eyang’s house back in Ciputat the street is full of them. Each house has a concrete bin outside it and each bin has a cat associated with it. Most of the cats are shy of humans though and I could never get close enough to pet any of them, but these dockside moggies were friendlier, perhaps being used to tourists.

Eventually the boat arrived. It looked like a seagoing version of a tourist riverboat. The trip was about an hour and a half and quite up-and-down in places. I am a salty old sea dog, but even my stomach felt a bit wobbly after a while. It was hot and cramped inside the boat with the other tourists and there were only small sliding windows that could be opened a few inches. Not a good place for anyone with claustrophobia.

Wendy, my little daughter, was the one to watch, being prone to travel sickness. Bless her, she held it in until nearly the end, but then was violently, explosively sick all over herself and the seat. We were well used to dealing with the contents of Wendy’s stomach though and the clean-up crew leapt swiftly into action, and everything was cleaned up and bagged quickly and efficiently.

And then we were there! The boat drew alongside the wooden pier, and we disembarked.

We walked along the sun-bleached planks and down onto the scorching sand, an area of tame-looking jungle directly in front of us. Through the trees I could see the buildings of the resort. This was it, I thought, I have set foot on my first ever tropical island. And yet, now that I was finally here, in my sun hat and flipflops, there was a slight tinge of disappointment.

Did you ever look at a tropical island somewhere remote and wish you were there? A travel show presenter strolling down a pristine white sandy beach next to an azure sea. An air-brushed perfect view of paradise. We see a colour-saturated high-definition version of reality.

I think - if you’ve flown across the world, spent the money, taken the mad car journey and the vomity boat ride - when you finally arrive, well the reality is never going to live up to the image of a paradise island you have held in your head all your life.

You forget that although it looks like in the travel documentaries you’ve watched, it still has the bins, the other people, and the unpleasant smells that are all associated with any touristy place in Indonesia. It’s still not quite perfect. Was there something wrong with me that I was not totally happy when presented with an island paradise? Perhaps part of it was that at that moment I was tired and hungry and in need of a lie down in a cool, dark room. It wasn’t to be, at least not yet and we toddled off to our beach house and unpacked, then headed to the restaurant.

It was a self-service buffet and I loaded up my plate. Basic food, not great. The restaurant had shaded wooden tables outside, down by the beach, a great place to hang out and take in the sight, sounds and smells of the sea. We ate, drank cold Cokes and Fantas, and relaxed. The children were too excited to sit for long though, so we set off to explore the island.

We started along the beach, but in less than fifty steps it was all blocked off by rocks. There was an enticing looking path going off into the jungle, and although I was aware it led to the staff areas that it would be impolite to go into, I wanted to at least feel a sort of jungle adventure sensation for a moment and delved into the leafy shadows. The children were scared and called out, that I might get accosted by snakes and spiders or something, so I turned back after no more than a few metres.

After going along the beach in the other direction I realised that the island was tiny, barely three hundred metres from side to side. I’d not be having any long walks here. The kids were having the time of their life though. Ida rented a kayak, and I took them out into the ocean. We looked down through the crystal-clear water at the spikey anemones below us.

In the evening, we had dinner, and located Eyang who has been talking to two young Indonesian girls in bikinis. The seemed to adore Eyang and when they saw Wendy, they are captivated by her and went to the island shop to buy her treats. Wendy received these gifts like a queen receiving her tribute.

The next day Ida had us all awake at seven in the morning to be picked up by a small boat by eight. We were taken a good distance north of Sepa Island to a remoter part of the archipelago. Today, the boys and I would be snorkelling while Ida, Wendy and Eyang remained on the boat. Wendy was to catch a fish for the boatman’s tea.

We were miles away from Sepa, in a shallow area of sea between some other small uninhabited islands. We swam through the rocks and reefs, the guide leading the way, while the boys, both excellent swimmers, followed along, taking in everything. I brought up the rear, watching the boys having fun as much as I watched the fish. Enjoying their enjoyment as much as my own.

It was a wonderful experience, but again, it’s not the high-definition, or slow motion and carefully curated experience that my mind expected from watching so many wildlife documentaries. It is murky when you dive down, the fish, those amazing fish, are all there, but their colours are muted, dulled by the tinted glass of my facemask. In other ways though the experience is, of course, beyond anything a television could give you. The warm water on our bodies, the taste of the sea, the tightness of our lungs as we dive down into the rocks to take a closer look at the coral and the colourful fish that lived there. We follow a turtle as it swam leisurely along the sandy sea bottom, gliding between the rocks, and then, on the way back to the boat after a good two hours in the sea we come across a sunfish (or a Mola Mola), and watched it in awe as its huge square body cruised slowly past.

When we get back to the boat, I saw that Wendy had caught a small fish on her line and was dipping it in and out of the water as the boatman laughed and encouraged her. Fly, fishy, fly, she was saying gleefully. I begged them to let the poor thing off the hook and put it back in the water. Ida told me that it was fish number ten that had suffered the same fate!

With the snorkelling finished, the small boat putt-putted its way further north, weaving between small distant islands until the water was so shallow, we could hop out and walk. We were in an area between two islands where the sea was barely knee deep. It felt as warm as bathwater and although the sun was hot, there was a light breeze as we walked through the shallows, the children running and splashing while we adults follow, taking photos and marvelling at where we have managed to find ourselves.

Apart from us and the boat there were no other signs of civilisation other than something off in the hazy distance that looked like a fishing jetty. I watched as our boat cruised slowly past the jetty and I felt a connection to this place, a sense of belonging, if only through my family, of times gone by when these seas were travelled by djongs and junks, of traders from the west arriving on these shores and explorers heading out further east in outriggers in search of the unknown.

I was finally getting it, that tropical paradise feeling that I had been hoping for. We walked between the islands, through half a mile of shallow sea, out to a sandbar surrounded by waters on all sides. The hazy air muted the distant green colours of the islands and accentuated the blueness of the sea and sky. The sand was white and pure, and so hot on the toes it was better to stay in the water. The children loved the beach, any beach and this was endless beach in all directions. The perfect beach, and they were at the perfect age to appreciate it the most as they raced, swam, and splashed through this world of half sea, half sand. Eyang walked behind them, her ankle length black robe billowing behind her as she glid through the water. Ida was somewhere behind us taking photos, recording this wonderful day in pictures that will never do it justice and I suddenly felt sad in the knowledge that this day will never come again. We could come back here some other time years from now, but not with our young family in this golden moment of perfect childhood. The feeling passed and I got back to enjoying the rest of the day, wading, and walking from sea to sandbar and back to sea. 

But wait, what’s that in the sand? A bloody food wrapper! I picked it up and read the bright orange packet. Malkist – Krim – Keju Manis. (Sweet Cream Cheese Crackers) This sudden intruder from the modern world was unwanted and I discreetly folded it up and put it in the pocket of my shorts.

The boat had been following us all this time at a distance, in deeper waters and once everyone had had enough it came in to pick us up and take us back to Sepa. Back on the island my stomach was not happy, probably due to the restaurant food, so the next day I mainly lay in the shade on a large wooden sun lounger, sometimes reading but mainly dozing, watching the children play in the sea through the smallest of cracks between my eyelashes. I listened to Ida and Eyang talking in Bahasa, exchanging gossip while they ate and drank. When they go silent, I know they are on their phones.

This is one of my most cherished memories and if I ever have trouble sleeping, which is rarely, I imagine I am here again, dozing on that lounger, feeling the warm air on my skin, listening to the gentle lapping of the waves and the sounds of distant laughing children.

Graham Foss