Hiking Mt. Bromo

Mt. Bromo is an active volcano on the eastern end of the Indonesian island of Java (where Jakarta and Jogyakarta are located).  Chris and I organized a night time bus ride to the base of the mountain and then a jeep ride to the trail head where we headed up the Gunung Penanjakan mountain to watch the sunrise over the mountains. 






We wern't the only one who had this idea... there were almost 300 other people there. Which, to be honest, was a little bit of a mood killer.




 That's a framer...
I took about 23455645645 pictures or so.  They can go with my large and useless collection of pictures of monkeys from Ubud.

After watching the sunrise we headed down to our jeep and our guide, Sayno. We headed through a giant dust cloud to the base of Mt. Bromo.  We took a 45 minute hike through volcanic ash to look down into the mouth of the volcano. Chris enjoyed being a jerk and making me worry that he was going to fall in. I enjoyed holding on to the back belt loop on his pants and inching him away from the edge.  Ahhh, love, so sweet.


 Instead of a Jeep/land cruiser  these people chose to ride horses to the base of Mt. Bromo.  I liked to think of them as bandits coming to raid our wagon.

 


I really enjoyed the entire morning at Mt. Bromo.  However, we did get ripped off a little.  We paid double what we should have paid.  We got into town incredibly late, 3 am, after a long bus ride and in order to catch the sunrise that morning we had to immediately take a "tour package" up to the top.  If we had to do it over again, we would have arranged to take the local bus, spent the night at the tiny town of Cemoro Lawang and found our own person to take us across that dust field.  In all, we probably spent $20 too much.... but when your room only costs $8 a night that's a big difference.

Travel Lesson of the day:  You always have extra time.  But you're not always going to have extra money. Don't rush yourself into making a financial decision that goes your instinct.

1 comments- my fav!:

Jamie said...

That's awesome. It looks like we're heading to Belize in the fall, can't wait.

Post a Comment