Tour d'Borneo 10: A Day at the Beach

How's this as your kid's sandbox?

As the journey was winding down, I spent a couple of days at the Pantai Pasir Panjang Indah resort. The name translates into English as Beautiful Long Sands Beach, and the name is fitting. 

Hello? There's no one manning the reception desk.

In the previous video, you saw that there were quite a few other guests there at the resort. The beach and the hotel were somewhat busy. It wasn't at all like that on the second day. There had been a conference at the hotel the previous day. Now that it was over, it seemed like I was Palapa Hotel's only guest. 

Next to the Palapa Hotel, there were a long line of beachside restaurants and souvenir shops. They had little to no business. They stood empty. Now, there's nothing quite like a cold beer at the end of a day on the beach, and you might think that that would be a specialty of these restaurants.

Nope. Of the 20 or 30 establishments, only one sold beer. And it wasn't cold. This was something I remembered from my time in Indonesia 25 years ago: beer with ice. 

I got to talking with the proprietor of that one restaurant. I asked how business was. He told me it was okay, enough to feed the family. He also reported that they used to get a lot more tourists, even foreign tourists, but no so much these days. When I asked about the beer, he said that a beer license is prohibitively expensive. None of his neighbors wanted to pay for a license when the product itself just isn't in demand. Again, West Borneo is very Muslim. 

At the moment this picture happened, I was being painfully stung by a jellyfish. It really hurt and this was the last time I went in the water on the trip. 


I've been through the desert on a horse with one ear...

Beaches which face west are the best. 

 Enjoy the video.