Sun, Sea and Sand

Today we go to the beach. Finally.

"You haven't been to the beach yet?" says, well, basically anyone, but on this occasion our host, when he takes us there one evening to watch the sunset. 

"What have you been doing?" Asks his girlfriend, just about managing to keep the incredulity from her voice.

We launch into a small tirade of 'things we have been doing', realising in the process that we have done quite a lot in Bali. It's just it has been green trees and farmland rather than bikinis and sun screen.

And now, with two days to go before we leave Bali for Australia, we have taken ourselves off for a day at the beach. We are in Seminyak, not really having been able to bring ourselves to go to the dreaded and infamous Kuta ("not Bali" say the Balinese). Seminyak is the posh end of tourism for Bali, meaning the sane beach but less populated, more eye watering prices and designer shops and a proliferation of people swanning about with perfect bodies, perfect tans and perfectly expensive bikinis. You don't sunbathe here. You promenade sophisticatedly up and down the shoreline. It seems.

We are common as much of course, so display our rather less pricely bodies on some sun loungers. And stay there. Or try to.

The fact is, it's a beach. It has an amazing body of water, salty and deep and filled with creatures we can't see, or even begin to imagine. It has, this one especially, being surf central, huge waves to remind us rather spectacularly that the water has a very strong mind of its own. It has hot yellow sand, clear foamy tides and sun. 

I love the beach - or more specifically I love the sea. I love it in winter or summer (in fact in winter more so). I even love it in England, where the sea is peppered with litter and child wee, the sand with fag ends and lolly sticks, and the temperature is enough to freeze that one toe you may have dared to put into the water. (I normally ignore this and swim anyway).

However I just don't have patience with the beach. I like a swim and a bit of a nap in the sun. But I am restless quickly if what is on offer is day after day of sunbathing, sun lotion slathering and turning of one self over and over like roasted animal on a spit. 

Hence the green pastures, mountains and farmland.

Of course I do like to acquire that elusive thing, a tan, so I tend to attempt to dutifully smear and squint and doze and turn. But I am distracted by an ice cream, the possibility of having an ice cream, somebody else's ice cream, or M saying he wants an ice cream. Or I fall asleep. And wake up half red and half white like a particularly dedicated football fan. 

So I don't last long sitting on my bed, even with the spectacular wave show, before I toddle off to buy a bag (tradition dictates that I always break a bag just before leaving a country) and just maybe - an ice cream.

Some time passes. I return with a bag but without an ice cream, we both leap into the sea and enjoy the mild thrill of being swept off our feet by it, before reluctantly returning to guard our wallets, and setting off to eat copious amounts of curry in one of the more reasonably priced restaurants. (It is hard to eat Indonesian in Seminyak, perhaps, like Kuta, it isn't Bali).

It's fun. But it's a beach. I think I even prefer a British beach with it's edge of danger, lacking as it does that sense of over privilege and decadence. There's something gritty and determined about an English beach. As though we should all be congratulated on or fortitude in being there. And it's my own country. I don't feel like an over fed over sexed visitor who has forgotten to check the currency of her welcome. 

So there you go. British beaches. Less beautiful. More home.

Remind me to visit one in winter. I want to peer at a raging ocean from beneath my scarf and drink hot chocolate afterwards out of a polystyrene mug.