Kura Kura Beach

By S:


Hello everyone - today we are back in pontianak. we spent the last week moving up the west coast of borneo and back. To start we had a long, bizarre day-long adventure getting up to sinkawang, which is theoretically only 3 hours away. sinkawang is a basically a small town in a forgotten province of a far outpost of indonesia, so it's really out there. we were back to zero english and tons of staring on the street. there's nothing really to do in the town so we just spent a
day there, before heading south to Tanjung Gundul, which is really just a village of a few hundred people. we were picked up at the road junction to the village by a guy on a motorbike who took us 3km on an unpaved road to beautiful patch of sand and to large wooden huts. here we stayed at kura kura beach, which is a little beach resort run by charlie, a retired, funny scottish guy. he runs the place with help from his local friend widi. the max capacity is only 7 people, and we were the only guests - so we basically had a kilometer long stretch of the most stunning beach
you've ever seen just to ourselves. we stayed for 3 days and got to know charlie and widi pretty well. the house we stayed in was very beautiful and, with windows facing the beach, we watched the sun rise from our bedroom window every morning. the food was incredible- everyday widi made an elaborate, delicious Indonesian meal from scratch, which was even better than the meal before. we each gained about 10 pounds each. we also visited the local school where vickie taught a lesson to some 8-10 year old girls. they were very sweet and were sad that we could not come back to their class the next day. we have some great pictures. we had a great time, and we are learning a lot about indonesian culture and its often
disturbing history.

we returned to pontianak yesterday. tonight we are heading by boat to semarang, which is on java, the country's main island. from there we expect to explore the rest of java before possibly moving on to the islands further east, time permitting.