26/01/13 to 27/01/13 – Our train pulled
into the city of Surabaya early in the morning, and we immediately took a taxi and then a bus to Probbolinggo. Here we waited for a minibus to take us up to Gunung Bromo (an active volcano which erupted as recently as 2011). The driver insisted on not leaving until the minibus was full (10 people), so we waited nearly 3 hours as one by one more people turned up. We eventually had 12 people, but the driver was now saying the bus held 15, so he wanted to wait for a few more. This turned out to be a trick to get us to stump up more cash, so we dug our heels in and eventually he took the 12 of us up to the village of Cemoro Lawang where we grabbed a quick look at the Volcano outer cone. We walked across the ‘Sea of Sand’ within it and took in the amazing view. It felt like we had been dropped on the surfaces of Venus, so unearthly was the panorama. We crossed a dried up lava river and picked up some of the lava rocks which had red and purple colouring which shimmered in the light. As it was late afternoon by this point, there were few tourists and we almost had the place to ourselves. It was beginning to get dark, so we decided to save the climb to the crater until the morning.
We took a jeep up to the top of the hill to see the sunrise beside Bromo and another volcano Semeru (very active) behind in the distance. Soon after sunrise the clouds rose up the valley and shrouded Semeru from view and later Bromo too. At this point we took the jeep back down onto the sea of sand where we made our way on foot up to the crater of Bromo itself. We made the climb up before the bulk of the other tourists (it was public holidays in Indonesia so it was pretty busy), which was good as we were able to get a good look around the inside of the crater and see the huge cloud of sulphurous smoke belching from the hole in the middle. All of a sudden the smoke would stop and we had a brief glimpse of the crusty rock inside the shaft before more sulphur rose out again.
We made our way down through many tourists making their way up and were glad we went up when we did. It was another sight to see all the jeeps parked in a line in the middle of the sea of sand. It was still only 8am when we got back to the village and we had a breakfast before moving on again.
into the city of Surabaya early in the morning, and we immediately took a taxi and then a bus to Probbolinggo. Here we waited for a minibus to take us up to Gunung Bromo (an active volcano which erupted as recently as 2011). The driver insisted on not leaving until the minibus was full (10 people), so we waited nearly 3 hours as one by one more people turned up. We eventually had 12 people, but the driver was now saying the bus held 15, so he wanted to wait for a few more. This turned out to be a trick to get us to stump up more cash, so we dug our heels in and eventually he took the 12 of us up to the village of Cemoro Lawang where we grabbed a quick look at the Volcano outer cone. We walked across the ‘Sea of Sand’ within it and took in the amazing view. It felt like we had been dropped on the surfaces of Venus, so unearthly was the panorama. We crossed a dried up lava river and picked up some of the lava rocks which had red and purple colouring which shimmered in the light. As it was late afternoon by this point, there were few tourists and we almost had the place to ourselves. It was beginning to get dark, so we decided to save the climb to the crater until the morning.
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