Mount Yasur Volcano! 🌋

Volcano day!

I decided to go with the afternoon/evening tour, so I could see it both in the daylight and at night. As the truck driver was gonna come to pick me up around 4, I had the whole first half of the day to chill and relax.

I still got up kinda early, around 9am, and had woken up at 5am to the baby in the next room making noises but had some patches of sleep again before actually waking up. I had a chill morning, reading my book, and had some fish stew that Mai had cooked up.

In the afternoon I walked around the village, up to the top of the hill to get a good view of the volcano. There’s some fancier bungalows up there but they didn’t look like they were being stayed in. Apparently after Covid the tourism here has really died down.

After having some more food and gathering my things, the truck came right up the hill to pick me up. The driver was funny, didn’t say much and was driving barefoot. His truck didn’t have a key so he basically hot wired it everytime to start it. And apparently it had lost its 4 wheel drive so just had rear wheel drive lol. Pretty impressive manoeuvring on these roads

We picked up one other tourist at some bungalows along the way, a French guy named Hugo. The driver then showed us videos on his phone of a tribal celebration he had filmed, and dance from a circumcision ceremony apparently.

We got to the entrance to the volcano park, and paid our entry fees. Thankfully Luke’s “volunteer” trick worked. 6000VT is still like CA$70 tho 😳. Better than 8000VT. And they’re raising their prices even more in April! Our driver then drove us all the way up the mountain, and we walked up to the top of the volcano to hang out for an hour or more until it got dark!

Although it was quite smoky and you couldn’t actually see the magma, it was still so cool to be so close to an active volcano!! You could hear and feel the rumbling every once in a while. When I first got to Isaka, I thought the intermittent rumbling was thunder but it’s actually the volcano!

Hugo saw a bit of the magma below and got a little video of it, but I didn’t catch it. The sulphuric clouds were too dense today. As it started to get dark, the rain came in and started pouringgg down. Thankfully I brought my rainjacket, but a couple other Chinese tourists that were also up there decided to go back down before it got dark.

After getting totally soaked in the pouring rain for a good 45mins, it let up a bit and by this time it was pretty dark out. You could see the red glow of the magma below through the smoke, and it would get brighter and dimmer as the clouds shifted. Not being able to see it, but to hear the activeness of the volcano was pretty crazy, definitely a bit scary and unnerving. If a hot rock came flying up we’d have no warning haha.
But so cool to witness that power, and see the glow of the volcano.

Apparently, according to Hugo who went back the next day, it was way better the day after, with visible magma being expelled from the top :/ too bad I missed the spectacle by one day but still super cool to be there!

After walking back down to the truck, our driver drove us back, dropping Hugo off at his place on the way. You could still see the glow of the peak from the bottom of the volcano! Just before the big hill up to Isaka, the driver stops by a river and tosses some huge rocks into the back of the truck. “My version of 4 wheel drive” he says. The hill up was pretty muddy from the rainfall but the rocks and rear wheel drive did the trick!Read more