John versus the volcano

---

Getting to Mount Bromo promised to be a gruelling day's travel whichever way we did it so we opted for the least-hassle option, namely a minibus that would take us door to door. With all seats occupied, it was an uncomfortable 12 hour journey, with the aircon malfunctioning (and melting my chocolate supplies) and little in the way of interesting scenery. Progress was slow, courtesy of most roads only being 1 lane in each direction and the idea of town bypasses apparently not having caught on. Despite having been assured that the minibus would go straight to Mount Bromo with no stops or changes, we stopped at Probolinggo so that some of the other passengers could sort out their accommodation and then had to change to another minibus to get to Cemoro Lawang, the village nearest to the mountain.

After a journey that took 3 hours longer than we'd been told, we weren't best pleased to hear that the hotel had just stopped serving food. The one positive about our arrival was that the outside temperature was nice and cold, a great improvement on the heat and stuffiness of both Yogyakarta and our transport.

Cemoro Lawang lies on the lip of an ancient volcanic crater, its floor a wasteland with occasional scrub known as the Sea of Sand, and with smaller mountains thrusting skyward. Bromo is probably the best known due to it still smoking and being easiest to climb, but Batok possesses the classic volcano's outline. Slightly further away, Semeru (the only active peak) produces small-scale eruptions every 20 minutes or so.

Viewing sunrise from the top of Bromo is one of the main morning activities, for which you need to leave Cemoro Lawang at about 4AM. With an undemanding walk across the Sea of Sand then a flight of a couple of hundred steps to reach Bromo's crater, you would think it wouldn't be too difficult to catch a sunrise from the top but we did. Twice.

I'm giving the RG a hefty share of the blame for our first morning's failure. After our long day of travel, no dinner, then only a few hours of sleep, rising from our beds in the middle of the night in an unheated room required much forced enthusiasm. The entire area was under a thick mist that restricted visibility to little more than the range of our torches. Figures on horseback cantered out of the gloom sporadically, offering us the services of a guide to get to Bromo.

The RG had said there was a path of white pillars that would lead us through the Sea of Sand but we followed this and ended up at ... Batok. By now the sun was already tinging the horizon with its dawn yellow and we wandered back to the hotel, cursing our dodgy directions. However the sun did reveal the stunning landcape of the crater, with the peaks all thrusting through the mist layer. We got a further version of the view later in the day when all the mist had burned off, and we could see better the direction we needed to take to get to Bromo.

The second morning, the screw-up was entirely mine. From Cemoro Lawang the previous day, the route to Bromo had looked straighforward but unfortunately the terrain at close quarters was a maze of dips and ravines, leading to us not only taking a great deal more time but also not ending up near the staircase to the rim. Instead we were faced with something more resembling a climb, which neither of us was prepared for. So we did see sunrise from Bromo - just not from the top.



Unfortunately our time in the crater was a tasty filling in a travel sandwich whose bread transport components both left a nasty taste in the mouth. Options for getting from Cemoro Lawang to Denpasar were limited - public transport would involve several changes, and info regarding the timing of the different legs was sketchy and held the promise of being stranded at some unwanted point along the way. So we allowed ourselves to be seduced by the lure of another door-to-door tourist service, run by the same company who'd been behind our tedious journey from Yogyakarta to Cemoro Lawang. That trip had been highlighted by the amount of incorrect info they'd given us. They surpassed that in some style on this one.

Our bus connection was 3 hours late at Probolinggo so we had to wait in the heat with about 25 other backpackers. The "special tourist bus", when it arrived, was just a normal public one. This became obvious when, 2 minutes after we'd been picked up from the tour company's office, it stopped at the main bus station and the ticket guy began looking for custom to fill the remaining seats. We were treated to a superb selection of hawkers and scroungers - some selling food, some drink, 2 guitarists and an armless guy (necessarily on vocals) cranking out some Bob Marley, a woman with a deformed child, and finally an old guy with unspecified ailments who shuffled slowly down the bus. This was all too much for one of the German backpackers, who pushed his way to the front of the bus and repeatedly beeped the horn in an attempt to force the driver to return from wherever he'd gone for a fag break.

The journey to the port town of Banyuwangi was uneventful, broken only by a meal break. Our tickets stated that a free meal was included in the price, however we were asked to pay - a double indignity as the food had been inedible. With no tour company agent on the bus, and no phone number at which to reach them, all we (and other passengers) could do was pay up and roundly curse the travel company for their lies.

At Banyuwangi we rolled onto a ferry and, an hour later, were in Bali. With all the delays as well as a change in timezone, it was already 10PM and we still had the prospect of a 3.5 hour drive to Denpasar. One good thing about arriving on Bali so late was that the roads were clear so we hit the island's capital at ~12:30AM. With no idea about decent places to stay in Denpasar, nor any wish to have to do further travel in the morning, we hopped in a cab to take us to our desired destination of Ubud.

We had some luck in that one of England's European Championship qualifiers was being screened on TV, leading to many a nightwatchman in Ubud being awake, so we took the first available reasonably-priced room and tried to see the silver lining in the day - despite delays and being ripped off and lied to, we had finally made it.

---

Photos

Our hotel
Note penguin statues