Gunung Bromo, Indonesia 06/19/08-06/21/08

From Yogyakarta, I took a shuttle bus to Cemoro Lewang near the volcano Gunung Bromo. It was a pleasant enough ride with some nice scenery, but by the time we got to Cemoro Lewang, it was already dark. It was a cold night and there was a sulfur fog all around town. I was worried that all of my clothes would end up being permeated with that smell, but that was not a problem. By morning, the fog was gone.

When I arrived, the guy with the shuttle company tried to convince me to go on the jeep ride to the lookout point for the sunrise volcano viewing. Apparently, that is what most people do. I had no interest in getting up at 3am for that. I asked if there were jeeps going up to the viewpoint at any other time of day, but was told that I basically would need to hire a whole jeep just for me.

The next morning, I hiked to the volcano. The town of Cemoro Lewang is built on the edge of the crater. Walk to the end of town and you go down into the crater. In the crater, you see a huge expanse of parched earth with the crater wall around it. In the center is the smoking stump of Gunung Bromo and next to it the inactive mound of Batok. Near the two is a big Hindu temple, which looks a little eerie in the midsts of all of that desolation.

Walking down towards the crater floor and across the crater to the volcano, several men on horseback asked me if I wanted to hire a horse. I didn't.

There are 253 steps up the side of Bromo. At the top, I could look over the edge into the smoking heart of the volcano. How much I could see depended on the wind. When the wind died down, the smoke built up and you could not see much inside other than smoke. I took a few photos with my phone intending to send them to people with some message to instill jealousy, but was unable to send multimedia messages due to the lack of 3G technology there.

I went back to my hotel and had lunch. Cemoro Lewang is tiny--a few hotels and their restaurants, a few shops, and not much else.

I asked the girl at the hotel if there were any more hiking trails around with good viewpoints. She pointed me to one that went up the side of one of the mountains on the edge of the crater. I went there after lunch.

To get to the start of the hiking trail, I walked along a little blacktop road out of town. Along this road were little fields of onions and cabbages among other things. There were tiny, rustic, but fairly well-kept houses and buildings. It was not the rundown cobbled-together tin-roofed landscape of the towns and cities. All this with the mountains in the background was really beautiful. I was so happy that I was taking this hike, and I hadn't even reached the trail yet.

A few locals waved and chatted on the road to the trail. One woman in a field full of workers struck up a short conversation. When she went to go back to the field, I asked if I could take a picture of her and the others in the field. She seemed a little dubious and was shaking her head. Then said, "Ok, 5,000 rupiah" which is about 50 cents US. I think she may have been joking because she seemed a bit shocked when I said "OK". Given that these people probably only make a few bucks a day, it was, in retrospect, a bit overpriced. FYI, it is not uncommon for locals near tourist areas to ask for money for photos. This is the first time that I ever actually paid such a fee. (Of course, I usually don't take pictures of people.)

I went on a little further and ran into three toothless old women in colorful garb carrying bundles of sticks on there backs down the road. We all said "Hello" (seems everyone knows that word). They stopped and one of them started talking to me, but not in English. I did not understand a word she said, and she did not understand a word I said. They seemed to be quite amused, though, and cackled with laughter at a few points.

I was really enjoying this walk. The road ended and I got to the trail. I went up the side of the hill--quite steep at some points, not always the most well-marked. The whole time I was out on the trail I did not see anyone else except for a pair of young Indonesians out hunting. We exchanged the few English words that they knew.

The views from the trail were stunning. I could see across the caldera--a much wider view than I got from town or from inside. I could see down the sheer wall of the caldera and the mountainside, which sort of run together. I could see over the fields and the town. Parts of the path were surrounded by little white wildflowers.

It was clear that this path did not see that many visitors. It was a little overgrown in spots. (I ended up stopping my climb because it was becoming a bit too overgrown.) I eventually had to walk while waving a stick in front of me to knock down strands of spider web before I ran into them.

The whole time I was walking, I kept thinking, "People take a jeep ride to some lookout point in the middle of the night and miss all of this." What a crying shame.

The fog was rolling in by the time I started heading back down. It got pretty thick pretty fast. It was cool to watch it boiling over the top of the mountain and down the slope of the side. I stopped to take a short video with my camera.

I wanted to use the internet when I got back down, but there is no internet in Cemoro Lewang.

The next day I left Cemoro Lewang to head to Bali. This involved taking a shuttle to the town of Probolingo and catching a long-distance bus to Denpasar, Bali. It was a 9am shuttle--the guy pushing it said it left at that time because the bus to Denpasar came at 11am. He had also said that all of the companies in town used the same bus to Denpasar, and hence they all left Cemoro Lewang at the same time. I believe they all use the same bus to Denpasar. I do not know if they all leave Cemoro Lewang at the same time. I ended up sitting in Probolinggo for 2 1/2 hours before the bus to Denpasar came. I was not alone. When I got to where everyone else was waiting, there were several other people. Lo and behold, one of them was my "girlfriend" from Yogyakarta--the Dutch girl with whom I had looked for hotels and gone to the market.

The bus ride to Denpasar involved driving across the easternmost part of the island of Java, getting off the bus on the ferry across to the island of Bali, getting back on the bus before leaving the ferry, and then driving to Denpasar.

A few times while traveling, service people will ask, "Do you have any coins from your country?" It is generally presented as coin collecting. I suspect that it is usually converted back into the local currency. My shuttle driver in the morning asked that question after everyone else was gone. I was reminded of it when I got on the ferry and a guy was trying to find someone willing to give rupia in exchange for euros.

It was around 10pm when the bus finally reached Denpasar--much later than anticipated and still not at my final destination.