Finding (My) Nemo

If a heart were a piece of rock, which you could just split up in parts, then perhaps I had left a piece of it in this one island. I wished that it would drown with the sea-current, grow with the sun, to just blossom as a beautiful reef... So that the next time I'd go there again, someday I don't know when, I'd find a big ridge of rock, so steady that it'd amaze divers, and whisper so intimately to me again: welcome back..

Last holiday season, a friend invited me to join her tour to Karimunjawa, a national marine park, Jepara off-shore. It's not yet as famous as Bunaken, Wakatobi, or Lombok, but it's quite nice there. The land is actually still virgin, the village is not so big that all the inhabitants seem to know each other. Everything is not yet commercialized there, like the over-rated Bali, so you'd expect a clean surrounding, and not-so-expensive things. More, the white sand, quiet islands, clear sea, the palm-trees, everything on the shore would remind of this movie Cast-Away, only in better shape. You're not actually cast away, you're not actually lost. I would call it escaping the town. And I do think it's a beautiful coincidence, that we're staying in this beach resort called Escape.

Although it's a village, don't you ever look down on it. The neighboring blogger would find it offensive and it would piss him off. So, seriously, don't. My room has a nice bathroom, a nice bed, and an air-con. The electricity may still be generated from a generator, but it's quite sufficient to support the water-pump, the lighting, and of course, the air-con. But beware of the mosquitoes; although it was said that there hasn't been any case of dengue fever nor the malaria, the bites would be annoyingly itchy.

The food? Er.. Well, if you're a big fan of sea-food, you're in your paradise, then. You don't like seafood? Don't worry, you still can eat, as there're still so many choices available. The food was tasty, but since I was there for almost a week, I got bored of seafood -  yet now, I miss it like crazy. LOL. Human! Tsk!

But enough about the land. How about below the sea-level?

There, there, have you watched this movie Finding Nemo? I bet you have. I cried from the first minutes, can you imagine that? It's quite embarassing, but the thought of the mother sacrificing herself to protect her egg-kids, and yet failed? I so hate the barracuda - nothing good could come from it, except a wonderful meal it would be on the table. *Grin*

But the real spirit is the father's love. How many movies or stories out there are telling about it? Suddenly, I miss my belated dad..

So anyway, it's quite the same as the movie. The reef, anemone, coral, even the clownfish itself. A friend of mine was actually seeing a rayfish, a barracuda, and a squid. The fishes were not so many as those in the movie, but it was quite okay. One advice, bring a piece of bread, then try to spread it in the ocean, and see the fish come to you. :-)

Don't forget to visit the shark, though. It could be scary at first, but it was actually not. The sharks were tamed from a long time ago, that it's not accustomed to attacking human. There was a story that one day, one of sharks was let go, but it then swam through the place nearby. It didn't swim through to taste her freedom in the vast ocean. Amazing, huh? Anyone thinking of having a shark as a pet? *Grin*

Make sure you'd return before the sun sets. It gets very dark at night in the ocean, you barely see anything, and you could get very lonely. The starry sky is good, though, and the local said that you could actually sit and count the falling-stars. But the real treat is when you get back to land to see the sunset. It is that breath-taking - if you get lucky enough to avoid the cloudy-dark sky.

 That very evening, the last day of my trip, from the bottom of my heart, I just said good-bye to Nemo, and hoping that the vast network below the sea would never be broken..