My Traveling Tale: the Exotic Ujung Genteng

Adventurous, an adjective; I find the meaning in the dictionary as

/fond of adventures/ or

/full of excitement/

And for me it means that you have enough gut to just go outside your house and go out of your comfort zone, wander and find new comfort in new place. You’re familiar with surprises that might happen outside, you’re ready to enjoy anything the world might offer, not to mention its beauty, kindness, and sometimes ugliness.

Well, to be quite honest, I was not really fond of adventure as I was a little. I tended to spend my time reading or just playing my favorite music home (not that I was a nerd). I went out once in a while, for sure, but that didn’t include exploring the neighborhood, or going to the preservation forest. But, quietly, I have passion of an adventurer of doing that. It started as I read books by Gola Gong (an Indonesian author with his iconic character named Roy). Somehow it inspired me to also do traveling, okay maybe dream about traveling. I begin to feel the need to see the world, by my own, you know. I need to figure out what’s out there. I need to know, the world outside mine, so that it will open my new perspective. I need to get out of my shell. Meet a lot of people, learn something new, see new places, know what God has given us, and praise it, okay, this one sounds cliché, but that’s probably true.

My first (I’d say a real) adventure of traveling was as I went to Lampung with my friend about a year ago, I’m sure I have written it in this blog, you can find out in the blog’s archives. See the excitement about going off the island for the first time. But now I want to talk about my trip, couple months ago, to Sukabumi. There were three places that we visited, Pelabuhan Ratu, Ujung Genteng, and Cisolok hot spring.

Let’s see the details.

Ujung Genteng

Practically it takes six hours to get Ujung Genteng from my friend’s house in Sukabumi, we went by motorcycle. The road is so sinuous and narrow that you have to be very careful if you drive your own vehicle. It’s about 16 KMs from Surade, the closest sub-district, since Ujung Genteng is quite rural. We may find the tea plantation, at the mountainous part of the road, and coastal forest near the spot.

Ujung Genteng is really gorgeous. The shore is complete white sand beach. There’s place like a lagoon before the high seas. It’s quiet out there, both the entire place and the lagoon, so you can swim safely. Cottage that we checked in was exactly in front of it, not to mention the gazebo nearby (we baked fish there at night and got fresh coconuts at mid sunny day, over the blue sky and green sea, good Lord!). 

You know the concept of virgin, right? Well then, you might categorize the place into that. Oh yeah, there’s also tortoise preservation in Ujung Genteng. You can come and visit then you can release a baby tortoise to the ocean and feeling that you’ve saved them, saved the earth. Isn’t that a great feeling?! I should say that the exhaustion of the trip will be worth it, seriously. I’ll tell you how to get there.

 If you go there by public vehicle, here is the direction. Supposed you go from Bandung, there you take the bus to Sukabumi taking about four hours trip, then in the bus station in Sukabumi you take another bus to Surade, another around four hours long. You’re almost there as you arrive in Surade. You might want to reload your supplies here, since you might find no big stores in Ujung Genteng, neither restaurant. From Surade you take public minivan (angkot), the red one which will lead you to the exotic heaven on earth.

Pelabuhan Ratu

There’s not much to tell from Pelabuhan (maybe because my hometown is, at some part, the same, though mine is cleaner and more beautiful hehehe). I do not really reckon the place, for maybe I came in the wrong time, sometimes it happens as you visit beach you know. It is dirty there, trash at the coast line, inconvenient waves, and so on. I did not even bother to swim there. So, I did not really enjoy the place.

Cisolok

It’s a hot spring. Here is the thing, hot water spurting from the rocky small river (there the hot spring, I guess), but oddly, the water around the river is not hot, really. There is nothing more I can tell from the place though; meaning that I don’t reckon this place either. You probably will want to spend your holiday in Sari Ater, Subang instead.

So that’s my traveling tale to Sukabumi. So eager to tell you another traveling trip that I ‘m going to do.

“Traveling—It leaves you speechless, then turns you into a storyteller.”

-Ibn Battuta-