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| Tanjung Papuma Beach |
South Beaches
The southern coast of East Java is blessed with beautiful & exotic beaches. Stretched from Pacitan on the west to Banyuwangi on the east. Unlike on the north that has shallow and muddy waters, East Java's south coastal beaches are mostly a white sand and clear water beach, with its huge famous tidal wave. Often, swimming on these beaches are prohibited. There were many lives have gone due to the wave. But the wave itself could be the main attraction for adrenaline sport lovers a.k.a the surfers. Each year, they have world class surfing competition at G-Land Bay on the tip of Banyuwangi Regency. Its wave is world class, many surfers from around the world come to do the challenge.
Pasir Putih Manikam, Papuma
The beach I am going to talk about is somehow close enough to that surfing beach. It is at Papuma peninsula, a small peninsula facing the Indian ocean on the south. It is called Papuma Beach. The name Papuma itself is abbreviation from " Pasir Putih Manikam", literally meaning the very small white sands. It's true, the sands on Papuma beach is like grain, very small. It is located at Jember Regency at the region of Ambulu East java. It is not difficult to find the beach, there are signs on the road heading to this beach.
Last weekend was my traveling time since I had one more off days after the long weekend. My first plan was to go to Bawean Island, since it'll cost a lot and I wasn't on the budget, so, me and my friend decided to go to Jember to Tanjung Papuma Beach. We rode motorcycle and departing around 00.30 a.m. in the morning. I like to depart around that time coz in the next morning we will arrive to the destination. It took around 7 - 8 hours ride from Surabaya to Jember (normally around 5 hours).
Like usual, we stopped for a rest on place the Indonesian usually made of bamboo on the roadside, I don't really know what its name. And another hour we stopped because of the rain, it was already close to district Ambulu. Untill we arrived at the Tanjung Papuma Beach around 8.30.
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| Route Surabaya - Tanjung Papuma |
It was public holiday, the birth day of Muslim's Prophet Muhammad, more like Christmas but less in celebrations. There were a lot of people visiting the beach. Since it is a peninsula, there are two beaches we can enjoy, the famous one is the one on the east side where we can find food shops parking lot and the bungalows run by Forestry Department of Indonesia (Perhutani). I went straight to the western side of the peninsula, less people with majestic view of Indian Ocean.
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| Google Earth View of Tanjung Papuma Beach |
The water clarity on the western side is better than the one on east side, most people doesn't know about the western side, they only know that Tanjung Papuma Beach is the one on the east. Most of the pictures on the Internet is showing the eastern part of Tanjung Papuma Beach. I never like visiting destinations with people crowd, besides it's disturbing my background view of the photos, the natural feeling of the place becomes less than it should be.
Once we found the spot to built our camp, me and my friend went straight to the beach to hunt photos. The water doesn't show blue color like the one in Gili Labak Island, due to the bottom of the seabed that mostly sea rocks and others. The white sands are mainly on the land side, this is because the wave always carrying the sands to the coastal area. Mixed with circular stones with variations in color makes the beach looks so exotic. On the north we can see high cliffs that stand strong facing the Indian Ocean. There are two small rocky Islands as the background view, and also at the far southwest we can see the Island of Nusa Barong, the Island of Snakes they say.
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| Rocky Islands |
We spent hours taking pictures with many poses, it's too bad that the clouds were not supporting our activity. Most of the day are cloudy and the sun disappeared most of the time. It didn't stop me to get nice photos when the sun showed up once at a time. There were few people built their camp here, it's not officially a camp site, the official campsite is the one on the east side of the peninsula. One ranger went to us to take retribution for camping and he suggested that we moved our camp to the east coast. He told us that there was a robbery the night before when a bunch of travelers lost their belongings which cost around IDR 20 Millions. Such a bad news for a place like this. All the time we argued whether we're gona camp here or move to Jember to stay for the night. But than we decided to sleep at the hotel in the Jember City.
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| Our Camp |
Midday felt like as if it is already in the evening, I decided to cook the instant porridge as our lunch. Enough with our meal we took a walk around the beach enjoying the serenity view of the nature God has given to us. Around three o'clock we packed our stuff and move to Jember City to get a hotel, turns out to be a scary old hotel in the middle of the city.
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