Bira Island: A Beautiful Piece of Thousand Islands

Bira Island: A Beautiful Piece of Thousand Islands – Bira Island is just a little piece of Kepulauan Seribu (Thousand Islands) which is also called The Hidden Island.

A Brief Information About Bira Island, Thousand Islands

Bira Island is a small island around Kepulauan Seribu, DKI Jakarta, which is always considered as The Hidden Island.

This beautiful island is still deserted from tourists and being there is kinda similar with being at your private island, except for the billing part. 😀

The white sand, blue and clear water will surely amaze you. Its underwater beauty is very ideal to major underwater activities such as diving, snorkeling or simply swimming.

Here’s the list of what you’ll get at Bira Island

• Private tour
• Private bungalow (Full AC/Non AC)
• Snorkeling (Full Set Equipment)
• Island Hopping
• Sunrise & Sunset at different possible spots
• Tea & Coffee time
• White sand, beautiful corals, very blue; clean and clear water
• Exceptional atmospheres and scenery
• BBQ at night
• etc

The price depends on how many people in a group and which package you choose. The available packages are available here and here.

How to Get to Bira Island, Thousands Island

Anywhere from Jakarta you can take any transportation, whether it’s public or private, and go to Muara Angke.

From there you should be able to take any public ships and you then have to transit at Pulau Pramuka (Pramuka Island) or Pulau Harapan (Harapan Island). From there take a smaller ship, normally a small ship contains 10 to 15 people.

Bira Island: Our Journey

The reason why I put this part as the last part is because, perhaps, nobody cares about the story itself. But I think behind every trip there’s always story worth to tell.

In the year of 2013, just a week before busy-weeks-of-midterm-exam, we gathered at a local restaurant with bottle of cold beers and some delicious chips, named Qmeals & Beverage, just about 5 minutes by foot from our campus.

We didn’t gather to plan to go somewhere, we just sit to have a meet up with fellow college-mates, no other thoughts. But, as our past trips were done unplanned, the same thing happened that night.

We were thinking to go to somewhere beautiful to give ourselves a break just a week before midterm exam, and Bira Island was come in mind.

At first we just planned to go to Thousand Islands, we didn’t know which one of them we were going to visit. That plan was fixed because one of our friends told us that her friends just visited that island.

We were in need to take a refreshing break that time and we didn’t want to take a trip too far from Bandung. So one of 110 available islands around Thousand Islands, at West Jakarta Bay, the one that was happened to be the chosen one was Bira Island.

We hired a local’s angkot to take us to Leuwi Panjang Terminal at a cold midnight, and from there we took a bus headed to Lebak Bulus Terminal, Jakarta.

About 5.15 AM we arrived at Lebak Bulus. Afterwards we took a Jakarta’s TransJakarta headed to Green Garden and from there we hired a local’s angkot once again headed to Muara Angke.

We took a public ship as our main transportation after having breakfast, buying some snacks and cigarettes for the smokers. And that time we were sailing through hundreds of beautiful islands via a very crowded ship.

Seriously, that ship was very crowded, too many people were taking the same ship. We were even afraid for quite sometime, at that rate, “will we be able to be arrived safely?” asked one of my friends rhetorically. All of us were scattered, a few with a few, getting along together in every corner separately.

To skip the long journey, I intended to take a short sleep as I always do, no matter how short it was gonna be, I should be sleeping.

But I can hardly find a better spot to take a short nap, even it was really hard to just sit. Several of my friends were having seasick.

They were forced to go outside to take fresh air, at least. And I was inspired to go outside too, thinking I could get along with some of them while smoking.

About 3 to 5 KM from the dock of Muara Angke, the sea was very dark, too much garbage, maybe? And it smelled very awful. About an hour after leaving the seaside we were very grateful. We could finally enjoy the journey.

I can still remember how beautiful that was. Blue sea resembled the sky. Smaller ships passed by with no hesitation. Sometimes we could see big fish fooling around altogether. “And now we can see clear sea water”, I said to myself.

After spending several hours, we transit at a small island, Pramuka Island, and from there we had to take a fisherman’s ship, which we then used to explore smaller islands around Bira Island. We called the ship owner ‘Captain Jack Sparrow’ (C.J. Sparrow).

That was because he wore a very catchy and fancy outfit, along with trendy glasses. And then before taking our departure to Bira Island, we watched Pirates of the Caribbean series, so ‘Captain Jack Sparrow’ really fit him so much that time, we thought. C.J. Sparrow was very kind to us.

Normally it would take around 3 hours to arrive at Bira Island from Muara Angke, but in some circumstances, it can take 4 to 5 hours to be there.

The same thing happened to us. That happened because some of my friends were still feeling sick, so we didn’t want to be so hasty. We took some time to rest while exploring the Pramuka Island. Pretty cool as a small island.

And from Pramuka Island it took around 2 hours to be arrived, and finally, we got so pumped after being there. Blue sea, white sand, very clean.

There were only a few fellow tourists besides us, the others were caretakers. There are several wooden houses, the one that belonged to us was a bit bigger than the others.

Didn’t want to waste our time, before having lunch we took our steps to explore the island. We simply walked towards the white sand. Sometimes we fought against the wave that challenged us.

In the afternoon, C.J. Sparrow took us to explore some great places around Bira Island. About 30 minutes if I’m not mistaken, we arrived at an unnamed island.

The water about 30 meters from the shoreline was very clean that we weren’t scared at all to swim. C.J. Sparrow gave us snorkel set which he already prepared for us.

And the unnamed island was very suited for snorkeling. The underwater beauty of the unnamed island is said to be equal with the one in Karimun Jawa. I don’t know the exact truth about this but I think it’s not excessive to say so.

Before sunset, we enjoyed fooling around at the ‘second unnamed island’ which has similar beauty with Bira Island and the one we visited before.

I believe that the two unnamed islands I mentioned before are part of Bira Island itself, or some pieces of it.

Just a few minutes before sunset, we took our leave with the C.J. Sparrow’s boat, and while on the way home, the best part happened that day to us. We could clearly enjoy watching the sunset. FANTASTIC!

Rather than the day we spent to exploring Bira Island, I think the night was more awesome.

Some of us ignored the fatigue we had after spending a full day doing vary activities, we went to the dock which we first encountered when we arrived at Bira Island, and at a spot, we could clearly watch the sky full of stars.

A very rare scenery to us all. The sea breeze at that night kinda made me don’t want to return home to face the real college life. Some say the magic happens at night, to me the magic really happened that night.

Because the schedule we had was very tight, that night was the last night we had to spend at Bira Island. A beautiful, simple, and short trip to Bira Island was something else to us all.