An Unseen Life

It’s just after 5AM and the rest of the village still slumbers as Wayan finishes a bowl of rice before shuffling off to work. Almost every day for the past 40 years, since she was a young woman in her 20’s, Wayan has headed to the beach at around this time. Lately she has had help from her niece but she insists that she’s capable of managing on her own. Wayan tends to return home in the heat of the day, returning again in the middle of the afternoon to continue working until around 5pm.

At the beach Wayan enters the hut she constructed of traditional materials; bamboo and alang alang, the dried grass that is woven onto palm frond ‘frames’ and used for the walls and roofs of many local buildings. She looks for her water baskets, each made from a single ‘Lontar’ palm leaf that nowadays are lined with bright plastic to make them more durable, and carries them down to the water’s edge.
Palm basket image: https://collection.powerhouse.com.au/object/223161

Wayan bends to let the baskets fill before making her way back up the steep shore where she sprinkles the water onto the fine black sand that covers this beach and much of Bali’s east coast. Each basket holds between 10 and 15 liters and a few trips are needed for Wayan to lightly cover a roughly 5m by 5m square of sand in sea water.

On a sunny day the sand dries within 4 to 5 hours forming a hardened crust which Wayan breaks up using a bamboo rake. The crust is then raked into manageable piles and dumped into a ‘bak’ or trough that has been carved from the base of a coconut palm. The bases of other coconut palms are positioned around the hut, all filled with varying amounts of salt water that has been left to evaporate so as to increase the salt content of the water. This water is splashed into the bak containing the salty ‘crust’ to form a hyper saline mix of sand and water.

Outside in the bright sun the remainder of the coconut palm trunks have been carved out to form shallow ‘drying racks’ and the following day, once the sand has settled, the clear, salty water is taken from the bak and poured into the drying racks. The weather is Wayan’s only concern and her business is considerably slower in the wet season but in the dryer months it only takes 2 to 3 days for the water in the racks to evaporate leaving a hard layer of shimmering white salt crystals which she then harvests.

The process of producing salt, from collecting sea water to harvest, generally takes about 4 to 5 days with each batch generating around 20kg of pure, natural salt; as Wayan has a few batches in various stages of production at any one time she completes a batch every 2 to 3 days.

Wayan’s ‘operation’ is situated near a fairly well known tourist attraction and Wayan takes advantage of this by selling her salt to tourists for a much higher premium than she receives from local buyers. Where tourists pay Rp20,000 (about US$1.25) for a small 200g bag she only receives slightly more (Rp25,000/US$1.55) for a whole kilogram from local buyers who use it for their own purposes or on sell it. If Wayan is able to produce 20kg every 3 days then she produces almost 200kg in a single month, even at the ‘local’ rate of Rp25,000/kg she should earn approximately Rp5,000,000 (US$310) which is not an unreasonable wage in Indonesia.

This may be the perfect small business!
Think about it… it uses negligible quantities of sea water, renewable sand and sunlight, minimal physical labour, and produces no waste. The plant (equipment) consists of coconut palms and grass, completely biodegradable materials that re-grow at approximately the same rate as they degrade. And it produces a reasonable income via sales of a product everybody needs regardless of the economic climate.