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Go back to Day 1
Bromo
At the end of the day on Saturday, H- told me that I didn’t
need to come back to work until Monday. Day off, woo-hoo! I wasn’t expecting
one of those while I was here, so I was a bit unprepared. My first idea was
that I would go see the local professional soccer team, Persebaya, play on
Saturday night. However, they were playing an away game, although they will be
at home on this coming Saturday night.
Plan B: see what tour options are available through the
hotel concierge desk. As luck would have it, they offered a tour to Bromo Ijen
(which I thought were the same thing, more on that in a bit), some volcanoes a
few hours away. I requested a day tour, and was informed that the sunrise tour
would leave at midnight that (Saturday) night and return around noon. If I
would confirm that I was in, they would try to find an English-speaking driver.
It was nearly 8 p.m. by this time, but hey, YOLO, let’s do this. The concierge
(a really sweet young lady with braces on both her top and bottom teeth) called
back to confirm shortly thereafter, and Leonard would meet me in the lobby at
midnight. The trip didn’t include food or horse rental (?), but the front desk
could put together a breakfast for me since my room rate includes food.
I went to bed at 8:30, not difficult for my still-jet-lagged
ass, and set the alarm for 11:46. I groggily walked down to the lobby, and
Leonard was there, and wondered where my jacket was. Hardy Minnesotan that I
am, I couldn’t foresee an occasion where I’d need to wear a jacket anywhere in
Indonesia. “I’ll be fine,” I said, thinking very self-sufficient thoughts, and
grabbed my box lunch from the front desk. Leonard drove me south out of
Surabaya for a couple of hours while I unsuccessfully tried to get a little
more sleep. The roads got bumpier and curvier the further we drove, and Leonard
stopped in a parking lot in a small village, which had many canvas sheets
covered in Arabica coffee beans, which had been harvested nearby and were now
drying. There was also a badass ‘70s-era Toyota Land Cruiser, like you see in
an old safari movie or something.
Leonard handed me off to my guide, Julian, and his
apparently mute driver, and we piled into the Land Cruiser and headed up out of
the village and into the mountains beyond. I was doing the mental calculations
for the hourly rate for three people and the fuel being expended to cart me out
of the city and into the mountains, and I could understand why the tour cost
was as steep as it was. It was already significantly cooler than in the city. Leonard
insisted that I would need a jacket, and he generously pulled his from a
backpack in the hatch of the minivan and handed it to me.
The Land Cruiser came from a land long ago and far away
before the existence of seat belts, although there was a handy strap above the
passenger-side window to hang onto. The jeep was a four-speed manual with
little in the way of exhaust muffling. Did it stall frequently while trying to
turn around on the narrow roads? Dear reader, I assure you that it did. Was it
quite loud and was there a strong fuel odor inside the vehicle at all times,
requiring us to keep the windows halfway down? You know this to be true. The path of our jeep coincided with that of
many others merging from several other parking lots along the road as we wound
up the mountain, and I realized that perhaps there would be many others who
chose this very night to also ascend to this specific spot.
As we curved through many villages with many homestays,
hotels, and restaurants serving the tourist clientele, I realized that I was
seeing signs for Bromo, but nothing that mentioned Ijen. I guess I’d assumed
that “bromo” or “ijen” meant volcano, and that the other word in the phrase was
a descriptor. Google translate was no help on this matter, and I realized I was
in error when consulting a map: Ijen was a different volcano more than a
three-hour drive away, and that I was headed to Bromo, which is the Indonesian
word for Brahmin, the Hindu god. This is why it’s important to plan your
travels for more than 15 minutes before leaving, to avoid these sort of
embarrassing misunderstandings.
It was nearly 3 a.m. as we parked the jeep along a narrow
road alongside many other jeeps and scooters in the pitch black and Julian and
I shuffled the last ¼ mile past vendors offering souvenirs (most of which were
stocking caps and scarves – Leonard’s jacket would come in very handy),
cup-o-noodles, and hot beverages. We reached the viewing area, which was an
amphitheater-like space atop Mount Pajaksthan (sp?) with concrete stairs for
seating, and already more than a hundred fellow-travelers had gathered.
Sunrise wasn’t until 5 a.m., and I was seriously concerned
about being bored to death shivering in the dark while occasionally being
blinded by the flashlights of vendors walking by hawking jackets and blankets –
Julian is an exceptionally nice person, but his English was broken enough that
it made conversation pretty labor-intensive – but fortunately the couple
standing next to me at the railing were recently-graduated medical students
from England (she German by Sri Lankan extraction) who were on a three-month
jaunt through Southeast Asia and happy to expound on their travels. I believe
their names were Gulya and Thomas, and they had been on a minibus that entire
previous day from Djojakarta through Borobudur and on to Bromo. They were
leaving soon after sunrise as part of a tour group that was headed to Ijen and
on to Bali. They were super nice folks, and I realized that I like most
tourists that I meet who are traveling to out-of-the-way places. They generally
are happy to put some effort into making their own fun and are more concerned
with the richness of their experiences than the fanciness of their
accommodations. I hope that I come off the same way to others.
The time passed pleasantly enough and before we knew it,
there was enough light available for even our phone cameras to take stunning
photos of Bromo and the surrounding peaks.
I realized that I had a time-lapse feature on my camera that
I’d never played with, and I started goofing around with that trying to
incorporate the now-massive crowd into the photos of the mountains.
At a little before 6 a.m., Julian (above) led me back to the jeep
and we wound our way back down from Pajaksthan to the “Sand Sea”, the
tabletop-flat desert area that surrounds the base of Bromo.
Julian asked if I
wanted to rent a horse to carry me part of the way up to the Bromo crater, and
then I understood why it was pointed out that that wasn’t included in the tour
price. We walked along through the sand and past many locals renting horses and
selling trinkets (Bromo’s a Hindu holy site, and there were several people
selling flowers which were to be thrown into the crater as offering). I bought
a fabric muff to put over my face to block the dust and also to cast a cool bandido vibe.
There were some Hindu figures carved into the rock on the
walk toward the crater.
We reached the stairway which led to the top of the crater,
and climbed up.
It appeared that it would have been possible to walk around
the entire perimeter of the crater, but there was a lot of loose dirt on the
rock, and the handrails ended pretty close to the top of the steps, so I
decided that I would risk offering myself to Brahmin on this day.
We retraced our steps back to the jeep and headed back to
the rendezvous point with Leonard. Along the way, we saw many different crops
being grown, including cabbages, corn, green beans, garlic, lettuce, tomatoes,
cucumbers, onions, and several others that I didn’t recognize. They were being
grown in some cases on incredibly steep slopes.
We met back up with Leonard and bid goodbye to Julian and his quiet colleague. Leonard and I had a good conversation on the way back, some of which I recounted in the Day 4 post. Leonard took me to a great t-shirt shop on the way back to the hotel, where I picked up some gifts to bring home. I got back to the hotel at a little after 11 a.m. It was a great trip, and if you’re ever in East Java, I encourage you to check out Bromo.
Onward to Day 6
Onward to Day 6
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