Day 145, Year 3: Another Day in Karimunjawa Paradise
Date: Hari Rabu (Wednesday), Bulan Oktober1, Pada Tahan 2008
Weather: Beautiful Day
Location: Karimunjawa Island, Java, Indonesia
I’ll start today’s log with an update of last night. After I sent yesterday’s log, the sun went down and the celebration began. It was the end of Ramadan and the mosque was blaring and fireworks were going off. This continued for a couple of hours and finally Justin and Jo decided that they just had to go ashore to see what was happening. How many times in your life are you going to be in Karimunjawa for the end of Ramadan? Probably never again, so you might as well take it all in. Mark and
I decided to stay on the boat, and actually Justin and Jo returned after about an hour as not as much was going on as it sounded. The town was rather mellow while a couple of guys in the mosques were blaring out the excitement of the end of Ramadan.
Mark and Justin went to town early this morning to try and buy drinking water to fill our tanks. The water-maker is having trouble keeping up with the needs of four people. But everything in town was closed for the day. After a month of fasting, people were celebrating by visiting family so all business came to a stop. So we will try again tomorrow to buy water. I stayed on the boat and continued to do laundry. We had built up quite a full bag of dirty clothes, so it took yesterday and today
to complete the job. By mid-morning, we turned our attention to the uninhabited island of Kecil which is probably about two kilometers from where we are anchored. We all headed out to go snorkeling and we really enjoyed the beautiful coral gardens. The island is just beautiful. The white sand beach that surrounds the island is ringed with brilliant turquoise water on the ocean side and beautiful palm trees, casuarinas (long-needled pine trees that sway in the wind), and a few mangroves follow
the water’s edge. We have decided that this island needs a new name-Jo’s Island. She loves it, as do all of us. Before we returned to Windbird, we stopped by the resort on the island. It is well camouflaged among the trees, but when you get up close you see that each of the seaside cottages is immaculately kept. Justin and Jo were hoping to be able to stay there tonight, but the cost was 400,000 Rupiahs or about $40US. This is very expensive for this part of the world and we don’t think food
was included. There was just one young man there who didn’t speak very much English, so it was impossible to get details. But the cost was prohibitive, so Justin and Jo gave up that idea. By the time we returned to Windbird, it was past time for lunch. We all had a big lunch and found that the sun and water had gotten to us. It was definitely nap time. I almost never sleep during the day, but even I was wiped out.
Around 4 pm, we got started again. Mark and I got enough energy to dive into the water for a salt water “shower” and then rinsed off with the sun shower on deck. Justin and Jo went back out in the dinghy to explore the island of Besar that is close by. They found it not nearly as enchanting as Kecil, so they returned there for another walk on the beach to collect beautiful baby sand dollars (not alive) and to walk in the shallow water among the sea stars and live sand dollars. Justin spent a
lot of energy trying to get a green coconut down out of a tree, but ended up getting covered with red ants that were on the palm leaf next to the coconut. They watched the sun begin to set and then returned home to Windbird before dark.
We ended the day with a chicken, potato, pumpkin, and green bean curry and at this moment Mark is frying bananas for dessert. We just added a little rum and honey to the bananas to give them a little spice. The rum flamed beautifully, so now it is time to go have dessert. Tomorrow we will move a few miles north to another island where there is a very expensive resort. We have read that the snorkeling there is good and we might even be able to afford to have lunch ashore at the resort. We’ll
report more on that tomorrow.
