Mount Rinjani, Crater Rim

Up at 6.30am, we had breakfast and were bundled into the back of a pickup truck with the rest of our group (7 people in total) to drive to the start point. Something we hadn’t read up on before arriving at Indonesia is that throughout the entire day prayers are played in the villages through a loud speaker (including on the Gili Islands as mentioned). Unfortunately for us, the loud speaker was very nearby so having been woken up at 2am, then 4am wasn’t the best start to the day.

The nerves definitely started to kick in as the realisation of what was yet to come dawned on us. On the way, we stopped off at a very small hospital for a health check up, where they took our blood pressure, height and weight to determine whether we were fit enough to do the trek which we were.

We left the starting point which sits at 1000m above sea level at 9.00am hoping to arrive at the crater rim before sunset. On the previous night's briefing, it was explained that the first 4 hours of the walk (to rest point 1, 2, and 3) would be the warm up. Although not a walk in the park, the first few hours were okay with a relatively gentle uphill gradient as we ascended to rest point 2 at an altitude of 1500m for lunch. We should mention as part of this trek we did not carry any food, cooking equipment, tents or sleeping gear. This was all carried by our porters. Porters are locals whose job is to literally carry our gear to the top so we could ‘enjoy’ the trek with nothing but our own bags consisting of clothes, snacks and a bottle of water. These porters are absolutely built of something else. They carry 20-30kg of gear in baskets tied to a wooden stick which rests on their shoulder as they climb up. They do not stop to rest and usually get ahead of the group, despite us only carrying a small backpack. Although arguably the most impressive part of all is that they do the trek wearing a pair of flip flops!

After the third rest point and 4 hours of hiking, the gradient started to increase more significantly as we began to walk up dirt and sandy gravel tracks. These proved more difficult needing to concentrate on our footing and sometimes slipping backwards. The next and final rest point of the day was at the crater rim another 800m up. This was a head down and just go kind of job. A slow but steady pace and we later arrived at the crater rim at 4pm, above most clouds. This was our base for the night at an elevation of 2600m, ascending 1600m today.

Having arrived we discovered that two of our three porters were there however the third was not. Long story short, he got cramp and really struggled to walk so arrived very late. The plan was to arrive, set up, eat and get to sleep at 6pm before sunset but we didn’t manage to eat until 8pm. Nonetheless, the views at the crater rim were breathtaking so it wasn’t a bad place to wait although it was significantly colder. We could see into the volcano crater which had a lake inside. We could also see most of Lombok from here and in the distance we could see Bali’s tallest volcano, Mount Agung. We enjoyed the sunset, albeit hungry and ready for bed, but did eventually eat and got straight to bed at 8pm ready for the 1.30am wake up the next morning.Read more