Taking a Dive
The Jakarta Post, Jakarta | Sat, 05/24/2008 8:20 AM |
Natural beauty and luxury await at an exclusive resort in
the
I stepped from the pier to holiday upon the remains of the
dead.
Throughout much the world, beach sand is the result of land
erosion. Its grains are weathered bits of
quartz that have been swept away from the planet’s mountains, hills and plains. The bits are washed downriver, beating
against one another all the way, to river mouths. There, the ocean tides, harnessed by the
moon, disperse them along the coasts molding our beaches.
However, at Kura Kura Family and Dive Resort in the Karimunjawa
Archipelago, all is reversed and it is the continuous offerings of the sea which
build the beaches. Located on
To scoop up a handful of coral sand is to plow one’s fingers
through a graveyard. In that measurement,
one will recognize polished sea snail shell
flecks, porous spheres of bleached stony
coral and the ebony spheres of sea urchin spines. The bulk of the amalgamation is a fine, delicate
powder which parrotfish digestive tracts have processed.
Opened in 1999, the resort is on one of
The island itself has been superbly landscaped. All the bungalows face west to catch the
sunsets and are air-conditioned, furnished in teakwood with limited satellite
television, mini bars and western-style bathrooms. The coral sand walking trails are swept daily
and bordered by lush green lawns, coconut palms, and tropical foliage. Hard wood dining and massage gazeboes dot the
grounds.
Red lory couples bob and laugh from the pinnate leaves of the coconut palms. A single sulfur-crested cockatoo glides overhead. At the seaside, white-faced herons patiently
perch atop their erector-set legs as Javanese kingfishers plummet into the
water. At dusk we watch the silhouettes
of fruit bats pass backlit by
the graying sky.
A walking trail encircles the island. It takes less than an hour to make the
loop. One morning my wife and I walked
in the darkness to watch the sun break the horizon rolling its strength throughout
the sky.
The white of the path is easy to follow in the ambient light. The stars above fade to sleep. We sit on lounge chairs on the island’s
eastern beach as the red bleeds up into the clouds above the distant sea. The deep hue crawls horizontally, like smoke
curling, reflective against a solid plane.
The waves come in low, whispering to the beach. We can just make out their translucent caps before
they collapse into vanilla froth at our feet.
Soon the sun’s light secures a finger’s hold within the warming clouds
and suddenly appears the crown of the day.
Later, following breakfast, my wife, daughter and I make our
daily walk to the pier to feed toast to schools of zebra-stripped sergeant fish
living at the house reef. Abruptly, from
the surface, burst hundreds of flying fish, to skim the water for at least a
football field’s length. They zig then
zag as one, their sides reflecting blades of icy-white.
Food is a common theme at Kura Kura. A diner can either chose the quality set
three-course meal or select individual items from the menu. The open-air restaurant overlooks two beaches
and the pier. Meals can also be served
directly on the beach of your choosing or at your villa or bungalow.
The eclectic menu offers everything from Swedish meatballs
to imported steaks to fried rice. Once
weekly, the resort puts on an impressive seafood barbeque buffet. Our favorite entree was the revitalizing
combination of grilled red snapper, lime, cilantro, tomatoes and red onions. Its light, nearly translucent, flesh was just
meaty enough to cap a perfect day.
The bar is stocked with over a hundred brands of vodka and has
a sunken bar in the pool. The staff is
always attentive eager to help us with any request we have from helping my
mother with her upset stomach to finding a fish identification guide book for
me.
Two days following my arrival, I step from the pier and onto
a westward bound dive boat to travel ninety minutes to the wreck of Mitra, an
Indonesian Pinisi freighter whose cargo her captain tried to save by driving it
onto a reef from where it promptly sank.
Cutting across the ocean’s grain, we travel up, over and
down moderate swells. The sea is coated with
watery tiles flashing shades of yellows, greens and blues. The clear sapphire sky holds just a few cottony
cumulus clouds as we pass north of Pulau Karimunjawa Besar to tie up at a pair
of floating tethered 1.5 liter water bottles.
Below, the lightness of the wreck glows tan through the depths.
Bobbing at the surface, Akim, Kura Kura’s dive master, and I
give each other the OK and descend feet first 14 meters to lay horizontally at
the wreck’s stern. The reef slopes
gentle westward.
The visibility is good at around 10 meters. This is much clearer than the two sites I
visited the day before in which fish sperm and eggs were suspended all around,
creating a haunted house effect.
The stern towers above us.
Its superstructure is painted with a lumpy layer of sea fans, anemones and
soft and stony corals. The fish
population is healthy with schools of fingerlings hiding in the recesses
offered by the broken hull.
We swim, our arms tucked safely against our bellies, to the
ship’s starboard before crossing through a canyon-like split to the structure’s
portside to round the ship’s bow completing a figure eight above, beside and
through the ship. Along the way we see a
large group of deadpanned tuna-like sliver trevally, darting masses of yellow
butterfly fish, a few adult long-finned bat fish watching us with big-eyed
wonder from beneath a protective overhang, a solitary coral cod or bar-cheeked
coral trout, many garish spotted sweetlips and a good number of aggregations of
15 to 60 centimeter fishes.
The sea floor and walls of the wreck support thriving
populations of heavily encrusted oysters and giant clams of varying ages. No matter how many times I snorkel or dive I
cannot resist these bivalves. I swim right
up close and quickly wave my hand, then take delight as gusts of water exhale
from their respiration tubes when they hinge shut. Mollusks may seem tough, but I’ve got their
number.
Just before the end of the dive I am attacked. A remora fish, normally seen clasped just
below a shark’s mouth on National Geographic, chooses to latch onto my thigh
which is bare beneath my half-wetsuit’s hem.
Regardless of how much I kick, it stays on me until I climb back onto
the boat.
Every dive is new.
Just descending into the folds of deepening sensory-deprivation is a
thrill. Humans only see within a range
of thirty percent of the sun’s light.
The ultraviolet and the infrared, accessible to many beings, are invisible
spectrums to us. Beneath the surface,
this limited visual sense is handicapped further by the sides, top and bottom
of the diver’s mask.
Light too is perverted by the water. Water absorbs light’s color from the red end
of the spectrum, so that as one descends all color is stripped away until all
is blue. This is great for a diver
ascending an atoll or fringing reef as
At the time of our visit, Kura Kura’s fleet of Cessna 172’s
was grounded due to the airlines dust up with the EU. However, that difficulty notwithstanding, the
resort is easily accessed from
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