Moon Garden

Bali

Hi, my name is Gonca. Those of you who have had the pleasure of visiting Nosara might know me and my jungle store, Bazzar de Nosara.

For the last five years, I have been coming to Bali to do the shopping for my store. Bali feels like a second home to me by now. Seeing the endlessly polite, always smiling Balinese makes work seem more like a pleasure.

I always take a couple of days to visit my friend’s hotel, Taman Selini (Moon Garden in Indonesian), in northern Bali. This place is famous for its diving and snorkeling. In front of the hotel, you jump into the ocean, and almost immediately come across the beautiful coral gardens, with all of its amazing, colorful ocean life. Every year, I dream about coming back to this magical place, to discover and play with these beautiful creatures.

This year, I’m here with my daughter, to show her all of the beauty I’ve been telling her about for many years. As soon as we got here, we went to explore the magical undersea world. It was horrible to discover that the beautiful coral garden has been damaged through pollution. The colorful corals turned brown, and the water is dirty. The poor beautiful fish are trying to nibble on the brown corals, in order to survive. It looks like a war zone underwater. What happened? In only one year? Can that be? Yes, it can! The big ships are unloading their garbage in the ocean, thinking “What is a little bit of garbage going to do to the big, Indian Ocean?”.

Soon we will not be able to show our children and grandchildren the beauty underwater. The problem is already so big that we cannot fix it anymore. Currently, it is confined to the area right in front of the hotels here, but soon it could spread to larger coral reefs. Here I am, sitting on the beach, and crying an ocean.

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