DUB Travels… (2) Karimunjawa Islands 2004

Posted by marc on Jul 28, 2009 in English Section, Travel | 1 comment

In September 2004 Wendy and I backpacked our way through the Indonesian islands Java and Bali. The Lonely Planet was our only companion and we were certain about three things. One and two being the flights from and to Singapore and the third certainty was our visit to The Karimunjawa Islands, 83km northwest of Jepara (Java). Here: http://www.kurakuraresort.com/ and here: http://www.indonesiadiving.com/karimunjawa/index.htm you get a grasp why we’d like to have a rest from our hard way of travelling particularly there.

Only once a week a ferry travelled from Jepara to the islands. Jepara is not far from Semarang, where we stayed the night before because this was a very special place to my father. The lonely planet stated that it was two hours by bus, so we called in a taxi more then two hours before departure. What we did not think of was the Northern Indonesian early morning rush hour. Never seen so many mopeds in one hour. They came from everywhere and made even our cabdriver nervous. Like flies they appeared left and right of our taxi. Some of them enjoyed a free ride by holding the sidebar.

The traffic was the least of a problem for us. We saw the clock ticking and every minute our heartrate went up. We urged our driver to hurry up, but the poor man could not speed up without making victims. Although some chicken did not make it to Christmas. Eventually we showed up at an empty port.

The chauffeur, who was tipped during the ride like he had never been tipped before felt, good for us!, a bit guilty and gestured that we had to stay put. Disappointed and confused we settled ourselves at the pier. After a while the man came back and screamed in excitement some Indonesian lingo. He pointed to the right and we followed him slavishly.

We saw several nice kept ships but we passed them all to end up at a very old wooden fishing boat. One man showed his two teeth as he smiled hugely when we agreed to pay him a converted 130 Eur (two monthly wages there as we discovered later). We did not look thoroughly at the condition of the ship, we did not mind that two other people joined the one man staff and in between 15 minutes we left Jepara port in a depreciated floating device.

Our fishing boat

Neither one of them spoke a word English. We found out by gesturing that it would take eight hours to cross the Javanese sea. The ship had no GPS, no radio, not even a Morse-device. After a while, as I was able to think clear again I got scared. What if they robbed us and dropped us in the sea? We did not inform anybody that we were crossing the sea by another way of transportation. Only the taxi driver knew and he could have been bribed. One of the guys was looking with great eager at my digital camera and touched it several times. He tried to say something and at the moment that I wanted to hand it to him to please him he popped out of the cabin with an Indonesian-English dictionary in his hands. I figured out that he only wanted to know how it worked and what it could do.

So when the motor stopped working at full sea I was not that much concerned anymore. That is, I did not think anymore that they were going to kill us. We still could sink though! The snoring sound of the engine after twenty minutes of nail biting was great! Four boring and still a bit scary hours later we saw land at the horizon. Eventually the captain steered his ship into the port of Karimunjawa. Only one fisherman was present there. He looked at us and yelled: ‘Miss Wendy?’. He appeared to be  the receptionist of the only hotel on the island and he had expected us somewhat earlier. His words felt like homecoming. We thanked the boatsmen, because after all they appeared to be very nice blokes who had to travel back for eight hours. So a big thank you for you guys!

We agreed that we would never ever again would leave a place without noticing other people! By the way: the island is awesome! If you get the opportunity, do visit! Highly recommended.