A Landscape of Desolation

A narrow peninsula on the southeastern tip of South Sulawesi, Tanjung Bira is known for its white sandy beaches and longstanding tradition of boatbuilding, revered by seafarers all across Indonesia, perhaps even the world. Chriswan Sungkono takes a look at what it has to offer.

“Where’re you headed?” the plump driver at the terminal asked as I got into the front seat of the van.

“Does this go to Bira?” I asked back.

“Fifteen thousand,” he quoted me the fare. “You have to wait till it’s full, though. Don’t worry, it won’t take long.”

As the van rolled along the narrow asphalt road, with the cheery view of the coastline stretched out along the right, the driver struck up a conversation.

“Got any friends or relatives in Bira?” he asked, perhaps curious why someone would want to go all the way out there.

I told him I was sightseeing.

“Bira’s the end of the line for the public transportation here, though I don’t usually drive that far. Not many drivers are willing to, you know,” he said matter-of-factly, adding, “People seldom go that way.”

The final 15 minutes of that 90-minute drive was proof of that, for I was the only passenger left. The back of the van was empty.

The van stopped at a dead end facing a well-paved rock face. “This is it,” the driver said, “Nothing much to do, is there?”

I shrugged, smiled and paid the fare. He turned his van around, honked three times (probably looking for a fare back to town), paused for a minute, and then sped off, vanishing at the main intersection. His would be the last car I would see until the following day.

The wind – or was it a gale? – blew straight into my face, twisting my hair up into a tangle the moment I alighted from the van. I made my way to an empty wooden bench at the edge of the rock face. There was the gorgeous beach below – the sand blindingly white beneath the afternoon sun. I had to squint to look at the sea, so brilliant was the radiance. It was an all-round assault on the senses, the intense brightness matched by the relentless swooshing of the wind in my ears.

Though the area was in no shortage of houses and semi-permanent shacks, there was no one out but me. The road was empty; the shacks were shuttered. I looked all around me for any sign of life, but in this buffeting breeze and scorching sunshine, not a soul was out.

But there were goats. A herd of them – lanky, black, clumsy beasts – bleating ceaselessly as they pranced around the area on an afternoon stroll, seemingly undeterred by the wind, in search of grass or anything else to complement their perhaps-too-scanty lunch.

It then dawned on me that my breakfast of coto makassar (Makassar-style chicken noodle soup) in central Bulukumba was more than four hours ago. The sight of those foraging goats had somehow served to make me hungry. I put off my plan to get a room, and looked instead for a place for lunch.

But my luck was no better than that of the goats. Close to the bench where I had sat earlier stood a large hotel in a sad state of disrepair, like most of the others here. Its wooden gate was ajar. I entered the open-air lobby, calling out and knocking on the doors several times. No one answered. A whiteboard on the wall listed in faded ink the names of guests and their dates of stay; the most recent one was three months ago. I stopped calling and left.

Three eateries later (either closed or else had no food to serve), my spirits plummeted. My hunger, however, spiked. I decided against trying any more restaurants along this ghost strip, turning my attention instead to the smaller shops in the hope of something to chow down, and finally settled for a cup of instant noodle bought from an elderly woman in charge of one such shop.

The path to the beach was dotted with simple signboards advertising accommodation. Some that I checked – either accompanied by the caretakers or alone (yes, alone!) – could pass for, or at least feign to be, hotels. Yet at all these lodgings I found the occupancy rate was zero: I was the sole tourist around, and I was yet to get a room.

It was depressing that such a beach with this degree of development had to witness its own undoing, as attested to by the rundown buildings and derelict facilities. Yet the road was relatively new, blacktopped and pothole-free. And the fact that its windswept beach was alluring, its sand fine as powder, and its natural environment – a dramatic mix of vertiginous rock outcrops, several kilometers of rugged coastline, plus an underwater world reputedly teeming with manta rays, sharks and turtles – still wholly natural, should have seen Bira hurtling along an entirely different course.

No tourists? Something must be amiss.

Sure enough, Bira had seen much better days. I later learned that during its heyday in the 1990s, tourists (mostly foreign) poured in by the droves, leading to a boom in the hospitality industry and introducing dive shops. Now, though, only one hotel offers diving trips – at a ridiculously inflated price, too. Even then, the local dive guide who I talked to didn’t seem all that inclined to take me on such a trip. (Not that I was willing to pay the price.)

It was time for me to find a room. An acquaintance of mine, a local government official in Bulukumba, the nearest proper town from Bira, said a night’s lodging at the government-run Hotel Pemda cost only Rp 50,000.

If anything, spending your time in a forlorn, once-prosperous tourist area such as Bira gives you a lesson in patience. (In my case, though, it wasn’t a lesson so much as a torment.) It was half an hour after walking into this dilapidated complex of peeling walls and broken windows that I finally met the caretaker. He’d been at home, he said, adding that nobody from the Bulukumba main office had “informed me a guest would be coming”. So much for preparedness.

In the end I turned down that offer for cheap accommodation, not least because of the toilet. (Make of that what you will.) I thanked the caretaker and headed out.

I finally settled for a room on a rickety stilt shack for triple the price (Rp 150,000) with the friendly “manager” of the neighboring Bira View Inn. (I was, as you may have guessed, his only guest.) It had two big beds, an air-conditioner and a decent bathroom. And above all, it sat on the beachfront; the view of the sea from the elevated room was worth the price.

Bira has two stretches of beach, which the locals refer to as Pantai Timur (East Beach) and Pantai Barat (West Beach). My shack was on the latter, which at this time of year was subject to the ceaseless assault from the westerly wind.

A 10-minute walk past roadside dwellings finally yielded sightings of more than three people at the same time (often a bunch of playful kids), before I reached a pier. Here, the air was still. Notwithstanding the occasional murmur of the ships moored around the pier, the East Beach was as eerily silent as the West Beach was deafeningly chaotic. (If I’d come here at another time of year, the situation would have been reversed.)

Although it too had some tourist facilities, the East Beach was less developed than the West Beach. But here I met some European tourists basking in the receding glare of the sky. Not far from their sun loungers, a fenceless village graveyard was sprawled out over the denser palm tree-covered soil. The tall cliff behind cast a long, arching shadow on the beach.

I moseyed back to the West Beach to watch the sunset. Of the few benches erected along the edge of the crag only two were occupied by couples – one middle-aged, the other far younger – relishing the orange-hued sky. I climbed down the staircase and had the entire beach to myself.

Part of me was actually thrilled that Bira was quiet, abandoned, forgotten. Perhaps I was enchanted by the sense of solitude the place exuded. Or perhaps it was the selfish part of me coming through. But I wasn’t sure the local people felt as I did, having Bira, which surely could be a top tourism draw, ending up the other way.

Bira’s circumstances have made it easy for people point the finger. And they do. The government blames the locals for chasing off the visitors by setting up the beachside shacks to sell them stuff – it uglified the area, the officials say.

On the other hand, locals point at the government for not aiding the area’s development, by making it easier to start up businesses, for instance. Or – and this was asserted by some people I met there – by loosening regulations and restrictions that undermined efforts to attract foreign tourists.

But hope is not altogether lost for Bira. First of all, its gorgeous landscape is so precious an asset that the people can, with considerable energy, turn the current desolation into magnificence. Even if we omitted its own beauty completely, Tanjung Bira can also serve as a hub, a transit point, for divers on their way to the Takabonerate Marine National Park, home to one of the world’s largest atolls and among the most exotic yet unexploited diving destinations in Indonesia. In short, the region holds promising potential for tourism in the long run, if managed prudently.

The way I experienced it, Tanjung Bira was a world of extreme contrasts. At first it was my ears that noticed it when I sallied from the West Beach to the East Beach and back. And nightfall brought with it another example. The sand that was blinding at daytime was now dark and opaque, as if these once-bright specks had now been flung into the sky, becoming the stars that shone with a fierce brilliance.

One thing about contrasts is that they often leave you surprised at things that in normal situations would be ordinary. Perhaps the best illustration of this was a nighttime encounter in the beachfront shack.

I was deeply engrossed in work in front of my laptop screen, glowing in a room whose two light bulbs I had turned on, while outside it was pitch black. The wind and the waves were my ears’ only companions. But about midnight, I heard a voice.

“Assalamualaikum,” the raspy male voice was but a whisper in nature’s amplified hush. I turned to the right, trying to locate the speaker, but adjusting to the darkness outside from the luminous indoors took a while. At the same time I uttered a reply, but it wasn’t clear since my entire jaw was paralyzed at the sight of a man’s head seemingly floating above the stairs leading up to the room’s entrance.

An apparition?! My thoughts raced as soon as my heart started beating again.

Seconds later, I began to make out the figure of the man standing in front of me. “Is this Bella’s room?” he asked. I asked who he was, who this Bella was, and told him I was alone in the room. He told me he was “security”, but everything after was snatched away in the wind. He climbed down the stairs and was gone, leaving me dumbfounded. Why on Earth did he have to wear a burgundy cap and a black outfit from neck to toe?

I awoke abruptly early the next morning to what I thought was an earthquake. The whole shack was quivering. After I gathered my thoughts, I noticed it was just the wind blowing even stronger than last night. I opened the door only to be greeted – refreshed – by a spray of seawater flung my way by the wind. It was high tide, and my “private” beach had become almost wholly swallowed out of sight.

Until it returned, until I could join the little children playing and building sandcastles on its silky surface, I would stay here. Drenched and shivering, I would welcome the invading waves.

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