The NbC Save Someone From Drowning On Tour

Part 4: Life in Paradise

Chapter 1: how to survive Paradise

Living on a beach in a tropical paradise is exactly how you envision it in your dreams. There's coconut trees, bright blue water, coral reefs and amazing rivers to explore.

When the surf gets flat you go diving, when the diving gets too ruff you can go surfing. Refuelling with traditional meals that cost about $2 will give you the energy to easily survive in these places with a giant smile on your face the whole time. But, with every great thing that happens can be also entangled a few minor challenges and painful things. Like reef cuts.

Every surfer in the world can relate to this issue as at one point in your time hanging out above a sharp tropical coral reef you are bound to get in contact with it. The start is okay - you put some lime in it, do an alcohol swab and then man up as one small tear falls down your cheek. The next three weeks is when the true battle begin. When those reef cuts do an impression of the volcanic mountains that created this wonderful Indonesian archipelago; your cuts turn into sea ulcers. Now your faced with a tuff decision… stay out of the water for five days and let them heal or begin to deal with a day to day struggle of keeping these holes away from infection and continuing to surf and enjoy the sea. We took option B. 

While re-soaking the volcanic holes on my feet with a little spearfishing adventure, I was faced with another troublesome problem some people face in the ocean - you see some people in this world cannot swim. Being able to swim in the ocean is a very important aspect of, let's say, staying alive out there in the big blue. So as I went down to try and take a shot at a fish, I noticed that my float line was actually pulling me back to the surface, with quite some force I might add. This brings interesting things into your head when your 150m offshore and by yourself. So I decided to swim back to the surface to investigate whether it was a shark that had grabbed the float line or some other interesting and friendly sea creature only to see a Javanese man holding desperately on. I said, “Apa Kabar?" (Translates to "How are you?"). He replied with a terrified look on his face, "Tidak bagus (not good)." I replied, “Kamu ayo pantai (you go to the beach,” and he nodded like his life has depended on it.

We made it back to the beach after swimming against the gnarly current he gave me a massive hug in the water and says thank you about a million times. The lesson here is tropical beaches can be paradise but they can also be dangerous places if they are not respected. 

Chapter 2: Beach treasures during our clean up efforts  

Within this region we have cleaned five beaches in total. This has brought us many rubbish treasures including 2440 bits of un-recyclable plastics, 1976 bits of Polystyrene, 1000 straws, 394 plastic bottles, 275 plastic bags, 120 thongs and bunch more items. In total we have collected 114 KG of marine debris which has been made up of 7705 individual items.

In comparison to the WA cleanups we did prior to coming here, we are finding a lot more items here then in Australia where we found 2215 items weighing a total of 19.73 KG. When you look at these figures it seems like Indonesia is having more of a problem with rubbish then Australia’s West. But when you compare population numbers between Indonesia (225.4 Million) to Australia (24 Million), then look at Western Australia’s population (2.603 Million) compared to Java’s (145 Million) we can actually see that more marine debris is being found per person on our sampled beaches in Western Australian then the sampled beaches (0.00085 Total Items divided by population number of Western Australia) we have done in Indonesia (0.000052 Total Items divided by population number of Java and Bali).

Interestingly we have found that the predominant items in our collections differed between WA and Indonesia. In WA our top 5 marine debris items were (Cigarette Butts: 32.14%, Un-Recyclable Plastics: 27.63%, Paper/Cardboard products: 12.96%, Metal Products: 7.81% and Polystyrene: 4.24%). In Bali and Java, Indonesia, we have found a totally different top 5 consisting of (Un-Recyclable Plastics: 31.67%, Polystyrene: 25.65%, Straws: 12.86%, Plastic Bottles: 5.11% and Cigarette Butts: 4.48%). 

A result that really surprised me was that the areas of Indonesia that we sampled actually had a lower percentage of recyclable items on the beaches then what Western Australia had. For the Indonesian samples we have taken only 13% of the total items found were items that could be recycled. Our Western Australian samples found 24% of our overall collections were recyclable goods. This is most likely due to the fact that within Indonesia there is a value for recycled materials such as plastic bottles, cans, glass bottles and cardboard. This value actually has encouraged less financially stable community members to collect the debris and exchange it for money.

In most of the areas of Western Australia we sampled there was no recycling facilities available and the only item’s that do have value, in a recycling sense is glass and can’s, which must be transported to South Australia. This model therefore doesn’t equate to enough economic profit to justify a person’s effort to collect them from the beaches as we have seen in Indonesia.

Chapter 3: On the road again 

Today is our last day on this beach as we are heading into the big city for a few days to check out the largest Buddhist Temple in Indonesia. We can’t wait to see what it looks like in real life. Then we are heading onto a plan and headed for an island half way between Northern Java and Malaysia to provide education to the school’s and play some live music for the community groups who operate there. Barely any white people have ever visited this island so our experience should be one of a kind.