Saturday, November 3, 2012

Mount Bromo

We made it onto Java after a long bus ride to Surabaya. From there we journey to Cemoro Lawanga... A tiny town on the edge of a huge volcanic crater. We arrived on Halloween night, and I walked to the edge of the crater. The fog covered the bottom with a couple of mountains towering out of the fog in dramatic fashion. With a full moon it gave everything a very eerie and lunar like landscape.

We woke up the next day at 330am to catch a Jeep we hired to take us and watch sunrise over the crater. A friend we made said it best, the scene wasn't necessarily beautiful but it was definitely a unique and almost out of this world view!

From the sunrise peak we went into the crater. Inside the crater is the active Mount Bromo volcano, which is considered sacred by many Indonesians (not for religious reasons). It just spews out sulphur right now, but we could still walk right to the edge and look down! Unfortunately, this day the wind was blowing the dust and ash everywhere. It was hard to see and we got covered with dust. A few times the dust settled down and the sulphur cleared enough to see the huge hole that is the volcano. Once we got back to our home stay we were covered in dirt. Three days later I'm still finding dust on me..

We came up past sunrise to Cemoro Lewanga, but came down in the daylight. The valley we went through was amazing. Huge mountains on each side that were still perfectly groomed into farms by the locals. Some of these fields had to be over 45 degrees steep! I'm afraid pictures will never do that drive justice.

We're in Yogyakarta now, an amazing city with lots of history. Getting here was the worse part if the trip so far, we made the mistake of getting private transport from Mount Bromo and were this lied to and extorted multiple times. Lesson learned.

pics: Lisa and I, also the smoking Mount Bromo within the crater, and a pic of the drive back from Cemoro Lawanga