By the way: Dog days for down-and-out Anyer

A trip to Anyer from Jakarta is not for the fainthearted. To reach the beach you must first joust bumper to bumper with the articulated trucks plying the Tangerang-Merak toll road, still the only route for all Sumatra-bound freight from Jakarta.

And once you've exited the highway, this strip of West Java's coastline, weekend destination number one for thousands of jaded Jakartans, still lies beyond a vast industrial hinterland upon which Anyer's steelworks sprawl.

The sea, when it does finally come into view, momentarily compensates for the three-hour journey. But unless you're totally used to the Anyer experience and have developed a hard-shell to its near derelict state, the beach and its down-and-out resorts strike a near fatal blow to the heart of the first-time visitor.

As Anyer is a weekend getaway, come Monday it sags on its ungainly hinges in exhaustion: weather beaten, salt-shrivelled and reeling from the departed weekend hordes. With the tourists gone, Anyer looks scabrous and hang-dog.

Its piece de resistance, the huge, 580 room behemoth Marbella Anyer Hotel, resembles a great beached leviathan despite its best efforts to cast itself as a Spanish or exotically Moorish resort.

During weekends, when the party's on, the crowds must go a long way to convincing a visitor Anyer is the place to be, despite its blatant lack of charm. Go at any other time, when Sol Elite plays the role of the abandoned orphan, and the hotel's vast interior, hemmed in by low ceilings as if imitating an underground car park, looks not just unloved, but unlovable.

On the Monday my family visited, almost every visible employee was hooked up to a piece of industrial cleaning equipment as the hotel, after the adrenaline-high of the weekend, began its week-long process of sprucing up.

But the festering wound in Anyer's side is not the hotels but, lamentably, the beach itself: ironically the very thing for which the visitor comes. Neglected by every single resort along a strip of what could be beautiful coastline, the beach wears a coastline necklace of garish trash.

I spoke to the charming, English-speaking manager at the Hotel Jayakarta about the unkempt state of the beach and he told me that, although only two months into his job, he had worn himself out talking to local government officials about how to keep the beach clean.

I'm no hotelier, but if I were in the shoes of any hapless manager of a hotel along the coast, I'd make that beach my pride and joy. Every morning, before putting on my tie and sitting in an office and feeling managerial, I'd announce to myself that the beach is no one's responsibility but my own. I would defer to no committee. I would make no announcement about our stewardship of the natural environment. I would, rather, get a rake – I'd buy it myself - and have my strip of beach pristine by 7 a.m.

The sense of neglect is worse down the Marbella Anyer end, where wind-stricken bamboo structures festooned with ugly blue tarpaulins stoop seaward in sorry disarray as if they are all that's left of a suddenly abandoned shanty.

It's this general derelict state that makes me wonder how we find it in us to despoil our very own backyard, even when the backyard is a kilometer-long stretch of beach fronting the Java Sea.

It's as if we have come to regard litter as a natural occurrence, like driftwood, that we do not need to pay any attention to.  

We will however go back to Anyer, for two reasons. One is because when eating in the dingy, cavernously empty Valentine Del Mar restaurant, opposite the Marbella Anyer, we were served fried fish by a girl whose guileless smile revealed to me that Anyer's cause was not yet lost. If a waitress can find the resilience to be personable and good-natured whilst serving a hearty meal, even on a Monday, when every right-minded tourist should have been heading home, then there is still hope for Anyer.

Also, I must also go back because the hotel manager told me he was going to deal with the dirty beach. I want to see how it looks swept clean.

— Adrian Thirkell

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