Day 147, Year 3: Kura Kura Resort–A Slice of Paradise
Date: Hari Jumat (Friday), Bulan Oktober 3, Pada Tahan 2008
Weather: Beautiful Day
Latitude: 05 degrees 17.232 minutes S
Longitude: 110 degrees 34.976 minutes E
Location: On Passage to Kumai River, Kalimantan, Indonesia

We left Pulau Menyawakan around 6 pm and it is now about 1:30 am. I am on watch and have to make this email as short as possible, but there are sooooo many things to share. After writing yesterday’s log, I went in with Mark to the Kura Kura Resort. Justin was busy working on his computer and Jo was just soaking in the beauty. This resort takes pride in every detail from the swept sand walkways lined with flowering bushes to the hand carved wood panels and brass door pulls and handmade rattan
furniture. The bungalows along the beach are not what I would call a bungalow. They are small but beautiful. And then you walk further along and you come to the walled compounds or villas. Each villa is surrounded by freshly painted yellow and white concrete walls and the entry doors to each villa are, of course, hand carved. Lax, the owner, showed us to Villa #6, the one he had chosen to have Justin and Jo stay in for the night. I must admit, I was a bit jealous when I saw their villa. The
“house” is an open concept with the only walled-in room being the bedroom. The beds are hand carved with high posts from which the mosquito netting hangs. The floors are all marble tiles and each villa has a kitchen, a bathroom with a bathtub and a shower, a living room, and a pool. The pools are marble lined and rectanular and right outside the bedroom door. The bedrooms are walled so that the air conditioning can be used in that room. The place was incredible and Justin and Jo looked wide-eyed
and happy. We had sundowners on the beach as the sun went down and were then Lax’s guests for dinner on the beach. Dinner was presented with the same attention to detail as everything else at the resort. It was delicious and beautiful. Lax is a civil engineer from north of the Arctic Circle in Sweden, but he has been in Indonesia since 1981. He worked for the first seven years on getting the oil rigs off Java up and going and in then in 1996 he found his island and opened the resort in 1999.
His brother, Stephan, had dinner with us and we enjoyed learning about the develpment of Kura Kura. Lax owns, and his son operates, his own wood furniture business in Jepara on Java and that is the source of all the furniture and wood carvings. Mark and I left Justin and Jo to enjoy their night and picked them up at 3:00 this afternoon. The spent the entire day in their walled villa just basking in the beauty. There is no way to express our gratitude to Lax for his generosity, but I know Justin
and Jo will never forget it. Lax simple admires the courage of those who sail around the world and his offer of the villa and dinner was his way of showing that.

When Justin and Jo returned to Windbird we all went snorkeling on the reef in front of the boat. The coral has been damaged, but there were loads of fish. This will be our last snorkel until we reach Malaysia, and I will miss that so very much. We then changed gears and got ready to sail. We are leaving white sand beaches and snorkeling and heading for the wilds of the Borneo rainforests in search of oranutans. Of course, we have to sail about 200 miles to get there which means two nights out.
We had a bit of a rough start tonight with winds coming a bit from the north, the direction in which we are headed. They are coming around more to the ESE which should make for a nice beam reach. The seas are little lumpy and Justin and Jo are sleeping in the cockpit. Hopefully we will have smoother sailing tomorrow.