So we went to Bali in the rainy season….no big deal. We booked an excellent place on the beach with wonderful staff and service. Before booking we read that while there is some rain there is always sun each day, and that turned out to be true during our first month on the island. Over the course of our first 4 weeks it only rained two days during the day (and we were actually happy to have a break from the heat). A few other days it rained in the evening, and we had several massive thunderstorms overnight that knocked out the electricity. All things considered, the weather was quite good.
The lovely green vegetation in the jungles of Bali.
Although the rainy season didn’t impact the weather enough to harm our daily plans, it did come with another problem that we found almost unbelievable – trash washing up on the beach. Our first hint of this came during the drive to our house when I said to the driver,
“Wow! Bali is so clean. Everything is green. We just left Cambodia and there was a lot of garbage along the sides of the roads.”
“Well, this is the rainy season. Lots of rubbish will wash away through the rivers. It will be very dirty. Lots of rubbish.” he replied right away.
I thought that he was trying to make the point that the reason it was so clean is because the rain was washing all the garbage away. We soon found out that this was NOT the case.
As soon as we got our place we noticed that the beach wasn’t as clean as our beaches at home, or the beaches we saw in Thailand in November. There were little pieces of plastic, small glass bottles, and shoes scattered across the shoreline. Coming from a place where our beaches are generally free of garbage we thought what we saw was quite sad. We went to the store and bought some garbage bags as we thought we could do a little cleanup on the beach. After all, we had 4 weeks at this location and it would be a good activity for us with the kids. I started to clean up garbage one afternoon and gathered a bag full. I figured it was a good start, and over the course of the next few weeks I was sure that we would make an impact and teach the kids a good lesson.
The Dump Came Ashore
In typical tropical fashion there was a massive thunder storm at the end of our first week. The rain was ferocious and so was the thunder and lightning. It was really fun to have the entire house shake in the storm. The next morning the beach hadn’t really changed a lot, but we noticed that there was more garbage floating out in the water and churning with the waves. Around mid-day I called Julie over to the back deck to show her a massive island of debris floating about 100 metres off shore. We couldn’t believe it. We had never seen anything like this in person.
A photo of the trash that washed ashore after a big rain storm.
The next morning we found that most of the garbage we saw floating in the water had washed up on shore. It looked like somebody had taken 50 garbage trucks down on the beach and blew them up. I immediately went down to the shore with a camera to check it out. One thing I noticed is that more than half of the stuff that washed up on shore was organic (i.e. bamboo, coconuts, palm tree leaves and other plants), but there was still an enormous amount of plastic….and a lot of flip flops and other shoes!!
It didn’t take long for the locals to show up on the beach looking for items of use. Some came and collected coconuts, others long pieces of bamboo, while others took small glass bottles. Nobody, however, concerned themselves with the plastic or other garbage as there is no practical day-to-day use for that stuff. I can honestly say that by this point I was a little discouraged. The little bit of progress I had made cleaning the beach in front of our place was erased, and replaced by 50x more garbage. It seemed like an impossible task to clean the beach, and that any effort to clean it was futile.
Why Does This Happen?
At this point I decided to try and find out how this happened, and why there was so much garbage in the ocean by our place. It didn’t take long to figure out. A few conversations with the locals, and drives around the surrounding area, gave me all I needed to understand what was going on. The first thing I noticed is that in the more rural areas there was no form of garbage disposal/pick-up. I saw many people burning their garbage in the ditches beside their homes. As I looked a little closer I noticed that the ditches contained a lot of garbage (despite what I noticed on our initial drive to our house). Perhaps along the main routes the authorities take better care to clean the garbage…..I’m not sure. One thing is certain, up in the mountains there is a lot more rubbish thrown about.
The second thing I noticed is that they do a very good job of directing rain water away from houses to the ditches, and then into the fields and rivers. Even in the rural areas there are small concrete channels along the sides of the roads to direct water. I then remembered what our driver said “. . . this is the rainy season. Lots of rubbish will wash away through the rivers. It will be very dirty…”. It was all starting to come together. The big rains come, the water rushes through the ditches taking most of the trash with it, it runs down into the rivers and then out into the ocean. Very unfortunate.
After this I decided to jump on the computer and do a little more research. I found that the area where we were staying (on the west coast) was particularly vulnerable to the trash washing up on shore during the rainy season as the prevailing winds come from the west (which pushed a lot of the garbage back towards the island), and the other issue is that the island of Java is further to the west so some of the trash from there also lands on the west Bali beaches. With this, it seemed that the mystery was solved. Honestly, it was very disappointing to see this, but it made me thankful for how lucky we are back home in Canada to have reliable garbage collection.
Where Does The Garbage Go?
Even though I was pretty confident that I had figured out the cause of the mess, I was still wondering where all this garbage went. As mentioned, our beach was in pretty good shape when we arrived…not as nice as home, but not nearly as messy as it was after the storm. Who took care of this? Did the government clean it up? How about the locals?
In the days that followed, the staff that looked after our house worked tirelessly to clean the portion of beach in front of our property. They raked the garbage into large piles, put the driftwood on top, and lit it on fire. The portion in front of our place looked a lot better, but the rest of the beach was still filthy.
A week to the day after the initial storm that led to all the garbage showing up on shore there was another storm. The wind was strong, and the tides were high (with a full moon). The waves crashed ashore and up to the edge of the property, covering all the beach. To our amazement, the next morning the beach was almost clear. Most of the garbage and debris had been pulled out to sea. I was a little torn. On the one hand I was selfishly happy that the beach was clean for our vacation, but on the other hand I was disgusted that all that garbage was out in the water.
“Operation Shoe-pocalypse”
Posing by our shoe collection!! There are 1,100 shoes in that pile (and I’m sure we could make a few pairs).
As I mentioned earlier, we quickly came to realize that we couldn’t keep our beach clean with a few hours of effort and a handful of garbage bags. However, we noticed that there were a lot of shoes and flip-flops washing ashore, so we decided to gather the shoes. Eve decided that we would call the effort “Operation Shoe-pocalypse”. I was totally onboard.
We went out looking for shoes every few days and what we found was shocking. During our stay we collected 1,100 shoes. We put them in a big pile just off the beach. I have no idea what the locals will do with them, but at least they will not be washing out to sea. One day we found as few as 17, but another day we found over 300.
I’m sure the locals thought I was absolutely insane!! They were watching me, and some of them were examining the pile when I wasn’t around. Oh well!! I didn’t mind, it was something to do.
Final Thought
I think I will remember the experience with the beach and the garbage as much (or more) than I will remember the our day-trip snorkelling, or our day-trip to the turtle sanctuary. Coming from an island where we are blessed with hundreds of kilometres of clean beaches it was shocking. I realize now just how lucky we are to have the public services that we have back home. If we didn’t, perhaps our beaches would look the same. The other thing this experience made all of us think about was the impact we can have on the environment. Our home is generally clean, so when I read about things like bans on plastic straws in some cities I wonder what all the fuss is about, and sometimes I might have even said it was stupid!! However, after seeing the mess on the beach in Bali we are all more mindful of our impact, and applaud those who make efforts to lessen our impact on the world in which we live.
Shawn