I returned to Karimunjawa for a second week, this time i wanted to do some diving over there as there were a couple of wrecks and some good amounts of coral and fish? Unfortunately i hadn’t checked how much cash i had on me (most business is done in cash) and when i originally landed i had a great problem getting cash out of the ATMs. For some reason the ATMs don’t like Visa normally only Mastercard, and another problem is that they’re changing a lot of machines from 4 digit PIN numbers to 6 digit. There was only one ATM on the island and of course it didn’t like my card !! Arrgghh !!

I had organised a 3 dive trip but realising i hadn’t quite got enough cash i had to reduce it to 2 then just down to a single dive, a real shame but i just couldn’t lay my hands on any more cash. I even went back to the bank with about 10 dollars worth of Malaysian Ringgit, 10 dollars worth of Thai Bhat and 10 dollars worth of US dollars. The only thing they were interested in was the dollars which totalled about about 6 pounds !! Doesn’t seem like much but it would have bought about 7-8 rice/noodle dish meals !!

I had the dive boat to myself and we set off for an hours boat ride to the dive site.

Ready to go down to the shipwreck Indono

 

Visibilty was about 7-8 meters at 14 meter depth –

 

With sadly only one dive completed we went to a local sany beach for lunch before heading off to a snorkelling site for a while. Fortunaley it was a far better snorkelling site that the ones i was at the previous week with more variety of fish and corals.

I returned to the main island and had a budget of 50,000 Indonesian Rupiah per day for the next 3 days (thats about £2.50 !), still enough to buy 3 meals a day and fortunaley the homestay where i was staying supplied free tea and coffee so that was drinks sorted out ! You really can survive in Asia on a very, very small budget if you ate the local food and stayed in cheap accomodation, maybe 15-20 dollars a day would get you by. Luckily i have a bit more than that due to letting out my house so i can splash out a bit more as and when i like !