Saturday, March 30th:
The 3:00 am wake up call wasn't quite as bad as it sounds, since we managed to go to sleep at 9:00 pm. When we got outside we saw to our great surprise, that the entire town was already awake and incredibly busy at 3:00 am. Henry was waiting for us and we got into a small Jeep. There were hundreds and hundreds of these Jeeps together with probably a thousand little motor bikes and scooters driving up through the small town. During the first hour we hardly moved at all. It was complete and utter traffic chaos here. Everyone honked and tried to squeeze into impossibly tight spaces, which made the entire gridlock even worse. It was hard to imagine how we would ever get through this, but somehow we managed to eventually get to the gate of the park, where everyone has to buy a ticket (which seems to be one of the reasons for the traffic chaos further down).
After that, traffic ran a little smother. We drove across the Sea of Sand. At this stage it was still completely dark, so we didn't see Mt Bromo, which was apparently right next to us. The road up to Mt Penanjakan is paved. After another couple of kilometers we had to stop, since there were cars parked left and right of the street, and no one could get through any further. We parked the car and started walking up the road along with a few other thousand people, and lots of motor bikes offering us a ride up. This is one of the reasons you have to get up this early. The later you get up, the further down you park, and the longer you hike up. Our guide Henry told us to go as fast as we can otherwise we might miss the sunrise 5:20. The walk only took about 20 min, and we got there at least 30 min before sunrise.
Seeing the sunrise over Mt Bromo clearly was not going to be the quiet zen like experience we had imagined. There were literally thousands of people cramped on every last ledge on the terrace and along the hillside. It also was a three day weekend in Indonesia, so there were a lot of local people in addition to the tourists here. Henry found us a place underneath the main viewing terrace on a little path above a big drop off. So we hoped there weren't more people squeezing in here and pushing us off. But it was all very cheerful and everyone was very polite and friendly, and no one pushed or shoved.
The changing colors of the sky in front of us were beautiful as it started to get lighter very slowly, but we only realized after about half an hour or so, that Henry had put us in a position, where we could see the sunrise but not Mount Bromo. Apparently, seeing the sunrise here is a big deal for Indonesians, so he had assumed that the sunrise is the most important reason why we were here. We had to walk around the terrace to see the actual reason we came here, the view of Mount Bromo, Mount Batok and Mount Semeru. It was already light by the time we saw them, but this was one of the most amazing views I had ever seen.
It is an unreal landscape - no plants, just ash, sand and these three enormous volcanoes. Mt Bromo, which is just a huge crater and the much higher Mt Semeru (3676m) in the distance are both active and smoking, whereas the almost perfect cone of Mt Batuk in the foreground is dormant. We spent quite a lot of time up here taking pictures. We were very lucky about the weather, as the people who came up here the day before saw nothing but fog.
Walking up to Mount Bromo: | ||
The Crater Rim: | ||
They dropped us off at the Surabaya train station for our 3:00 pm train to Yogyakarta, which takes 4 hours 45 min. The train ride was very nice (we were in Executive Class) and fairly uneventful. There are people selling interesting food at every station we stopped. We decided to try a few things from the stations rather than the Nasi Goreng, which the train staff seemed to offer us about every 20 min. The train arrived in Yogyakarta 30 min late, and it was raining pretty heavily here. We got a taxi to the very nice Phoenix Hotel.
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