Bara Beach is, quite literally, a breath of fresh air. At the very tip of the northern leg of the island of Sulawesi, it’s known for excellent diving, beautiful beaches and a laid back pace of life.

You won’t find Bara Beach Bungalows easily, even if you’re looking for it. Drive all the way to the pier in the tourist district of Bira, then turn around and head back out. Take your first left and keep going. At the Y, lean right and keep going. 2 km feels like 5 and you’ll be quite sure you’re well lost before the little clutch of 6 bungalows appears on your left. It’s well worth finding.

There aren’t many places left where you’ll truly have a beach to yourself.

This is one of them. We are the only guests in residence and the staff is duly attentive. The bungalows are set in a lovely garden carved from the volcanic rock, each its own separate cabin on top of a low sea cliff with steps down to the beach.

I walked a long hour along the coast this morning on a wild beach. No one has tamed this one. Palm logs riddled with bug holes are washed up with bleached driftwood bones, a yellow flip-flop and the ubiquitous plastic bottles that we’re drowning our world in. Blue and white coral is strewn like confetti studded with shells as far as the water washes in, continually rearranging it like a living mosaic.

The wind blew hard off of the Flores Sea, chasing the morning storm that washed the salt back into the ocean and whipped my pink tulip dress around my knees as the sand squished up between my toes. The salt water stung along the edge of my toenail, hopefully working sea-magic on the infection I’ve been fighting for a week.

Coconut palms line the shore, roots exposed from the relentless attack of the tides, leaning at rakish angles away from the wind. I’m always amazed at the tenacity of the little flower pods that hold heavy coconuts to the top of these wind whipped trees, one would expect a hail of volleyball sized nuts with the first good blow, but it doesn’t seem to happen.

There is a palm thatched fisherman’s shack about half a kilometer down the beach. Weighted nets, crusted white with salt, are hung over bamboo poles to dry. A boat is pulled up on the sand. There is no movement.

In fact, I see no one at all, besides my three boys who are wrestling like maniacs in the surf when I first hit the beach. They yell to me, and I wave before the wind and the surf drown their voices. The only footprints are those of some animal, and the micro-prints the crabs make in their zig-zag patterns across the sand.

I sat in a tiny cove for a long while, staring out at the sea and memorizing the azure rainbow, from midnight blue to a shade that reminds me of the Berry Blue Koolaid of my youth with a teaspoon of milk stirred into the glass. The first ten yards of wash are the exact colours of a bracelet my friend Lois made for me years ago. It’s my favourite.

The ancient rock whispered to me about the first day that she saw the sea, having rolled across the plane as young lava, folding over herself like cooling taffy before dripping into the cool salt blue, boiling it and erupting in a cloud of steam. I studied the holes and folds of the stone and listened for stories in the bubbles and breaks. I was reminded of the sharp lava rock at Paamul, in Mexico, where I ran and often cut my feet as a little girl, plucking fat snails from between the cracks where the water washed in, and taking pails full to beg my mother to cook with our dinner. She would only cook the biggest ones.

There is no substitute for a hard salt wind and the roar of settling waves to drown out the sounds of my own thoughts, and to blow the lint from the filter of my soul. It passes right through the fiber of me, as surely as it does my dress and hair. The sand smooths my feet, the wind smooths the wrinkles of my mind. The waves wash sand around my feet and it sticks, as it always does, beneath the leather braid on my right ankle. It rubs slightly, and burns. I keep walking. The gentle pain a metaphor for life, the leather for the few who travel with me in spite of it.