gaute.vetsj.com

I took the train from Jakarta to Yogyakarta on the 10th of April, the whole trip took about 9 hours, but I traveled on Exekutif class where I got some meals and had enough leg room – which is quite rare for anybody over 1.70 m tall in Indonesia. It was a strong contrast to the bus ride from Yogyakarta to the Borobodur temple using local transport.. my legs just did not fit!

Borobodur is a Buddhist temple built in the ninth century, a pyramid with different levels you walk around. All the walls have carved out decorations and motives from all kinds of feasts and feats. Really nice, the rain chased away everybody else so I was alone on the temple.. But after a short while the hawkers came out from wherever they were hiding.

After some days in Yogyakarta I took a bus to Mt. Bromo, south of Surabaya, about 10 hours. The town I stayed in, Cerewa Lawang, should be at about 2000 meters gave me some relief from the heat of the lower parts. We arrived in the evening and got up at about 3am starting for the view point to see the sun rise over the Bromo massive. I was walking with Rowan from Ireland while the rest of the tourists that arrived with us charterd jeeps over the sand sea and up to the view point. We started out in complete darkness, got lost after about 20 minutes and walked through dense vegetation and finally found the second half of the path. But it was a great walk. We got up just after the jeeps, but still in time for the sunrise.

Mt. Bromo is actually made up of the Old Bromo and the New Bromo, the Old Bromo blew its top off and contains a sand sea and a couple of other smaller volcanoes, the one at the bottom of the photo is Mt. Batok – the New Bromo is hidden in the sulphur clouds behind Batok. In the far back above everything is Mt. Semeru – shooting off a cloud every half hour – it is possible to walk up there, but it would take about three days – I am going to that Next Time ™.

As the jeeps and the tourists left we naturally had to walk down again, we took the same path, but this time we were able to see something and we had a great view all the time down, we were back at the hotel by 8 am.

After breakfast we walked over the sand sea (about 40 minutes) and walked up the stairs to the New Bromo and walked around the crater, dodging stinking and nose-itching sulphur clouds. And then back to the hotel for Rowans bus the same afternoon.

New Bromo

I had decided to stay two more nights and rented a mountain bike, had to give away my passport for it, but it was the only rental there.. cost about as much as renting a motorbike in Bali. I biked down to the sand sea and continued to the left of Bromo and eventually ended up in grass coated fields between the steep crater wall of Old Bromo and the slow slopes up to the crater of New Bromo. The contrast could not have been bigger between the scorched north east side of New Bromo and the green south side.

When I finally got up the road up to the outer crater I was met with massive fog and a man who wanted my water bottle, probably just to turn it in and get some rupiahs for it, but he looked pretty bad so I gave it away, not thinking that I had to go back through the sun in the sand desert for about two hours without water.. So without water I decided to turn back then anyway. It would have been about 10-15km to the next village on the road if I had continued on.. and not gotten lost in the fog.

Next morning the bus left at 9 (around 10 indonesian time), when we got down from the mountains we could continue on in a fancy bus with lots of small insects that would bite you if you fell asleep. And something must have died inside the air condition system, every now and then the bus driver would spray something into it, perhaps just something to keep people calm while he drove like a maniac.. But apart from that and a ferry going zig-zag over to Bali the bus ride was eventless.

I stayed two nights in Kuta and left for Sydney on the 18th of April.

There are a few more photos on my flickr page, both from Indonesia as from Australia (you have to sign in and be listed as my friend to see all of them). As I get home in a couple of weeks I will describe them and many more yet to be uploaded.

Cheers! Gaute, Bundaberg