No concrete yet. Kerandangan Beach, Lombok, Indonesia
It's always a joy to return to marvellous and hospitable and very pretty Lombok. Especially the last decade has seen a rise in living standards and well-being of the native population through the tourist industry. But at the same time, here, too, there are the negatives of development. There's an awful clutter of unfinished - never to be finished - hotel clusters where the owners have run out of money and abandoned them. The last ten years has seen the regretable accumulation of lots of rubbish by the roadways.
More money also means more traffic: many cars and a very plenitude of motorcycles have pushed the cidomos, the traditional horse-drawn carts, to the margins of traffic. And think of the poor walkers on these often traffic congested roads!
Scrambling over rocks and splashing through the pristine waters of the sandy beaches I made my way from Mangsit to Sengiggi for some chores. I decided to walk back by way of the road north from Sengiggi. I'd walked that pleasant way many times over the years.
Today I'm sad. A very long stretch of it has been marred by a 2-metres high concrete wall. It used to be so wonderful to walk here and to have a view through wildflower-filled green pastures with light brown cattle and the grey trunks of the coconut trees to the Everblue Sea. Now that two-kilometer (!) long wall is in the way. It's said a huge hotel will be built here. More's the pity.
I'd taken this photo on the seaside of the wall earlier in the morning. It shows things as they once were looking from the road. No longer... There's no concrete here in this view yet. Until this scene makes way for the pasteurised and 'sanitised' green hotel lawns and their concrete buildings.
PS There's something wrong with the flickr map function. Though I placed this photo in Lombok, the map designation shows it as Bali and moreover in the Timor Sea.
No concrete yet. Kerandangan Beach, Lombok, Indonesia
It's always a joy to return to marvellous and hospitable and very pretty Lombok. Especially the last decade has seen a rise in living standards and well-being of the native population through the tourist industry. But at the same time, here, too, there are the negatives of development. There's an awful clutter of unfinished - never to be finished - hotel clusters where the owners have run out of money and abandoned them. The last ten years has seen the regretable accumulation of lots of rubbish by the roadways.
More money also means more traffic: many cars and a very plenitude of motorcycles have pushed the cidomos, the traditional horse-drawn carts, to the margins of traffic. And think of the poor walkers on these often traffic congested roads!
Scrambling over rocks and splashing through the pristine waters of the sandy beaches I made my way from Mangsit to Sengiggi for some chores. I decided to walk back by way of the road north from Sengiggi. I'd walked that pleasant way many times over the years.
Today I'm sad. A very long stretch of it has been marred by a 2-metres high concrete wall. It used to be so wonderful to walk here and to have a view through wildflower-filled green pastures with light brown cattle and the grey trunks of the coconut trees to the Everblue Sea. Now that two-kilometer (!) long wall is in the way. It's said a huge hotel will be built here. More's the pity.
I'd taken this photo on the seaside of the wall earlier in the morning. It shows things as they once were looking from the road. No longer... There's no concrete here in this view yet. Until this scene makes way for the pasteurised and 'sanitised' green hotel lawns and their concrete buildings.
PS There's something wrong with the flickr map function. Though I placed this photo in Lombok, the map designation shows it as Bali and moreover in the Timor Sea.