Gunung Pananjakan

With an alcohol fuelled all-nighter weighing on me, the full day of travel ahead tested the limits of my endurance. It started with a car transfer to the train station followed by an 8 hour train ride to a coastal town called Probolinggo. Despite my tiredness, I couldn't rest in the short, vertical and non reclinable seats. The non existent leg room restricting my positioning options. Vasco was deep asleep, head hanging like a ragdoll with the shaking of the carriage. I felt myself slipping in and out of consciousness, but never comfortable or rested.

We arrived at Probolinggo in the middle of the afternoon. A short middle aged man was waiting for us with a paper sign. He was to bring us to the tour agency, maybe one hour away, where all the travellers would gather to then be taken up the mountains. "Where are you guys from?", he asked us, showing very little interest in the answer other than a poor attempt at a Ronaldo joke. He asked us to wait for other travellers so that he didn't have to do multiple trips. We agreed without hesitation but even then he aggressively warned us not to tell his superiors which apparently some tourists did, getting him in trouble. He was a bit of a strange man.

To kill some time, he dropped us at the the town's pier. A place nice enough to walk a bit by the sea and enjoy some sun. The small beach next to the pier didn't have the most appealing appearance. In the distance, big cargo ships and other boats dotted the horizon. Walking alongside the pier, we reached a wired fence with a large human sized hole in it. Some people crossed casually in both directions so we decided to cross it as well. It felt like the kind of place where teenagers came to hangout. We saw fishermen waiting patiently beside their fishing rods, dogs being walked, a diver catching sea porcupines, and young people chatting the afternoon away in small groups.

Probolinggo, and its industrial pier, didn't have much to offer. We met with our driver and he took us to the train station where we waited for the others.

Eventually the old van became full of westerners and their luggage. It took us maybe 40 minutes to get to the agency's office where a tourist agent detailed the plan for the next couple of days over a comically bad map painted on the wall behind the counter. We were then separated into small vans to take on the 2 or 3 hours trip through the wild interior of the island towards the guest house at the base of the Bromo mountain. The night fell as we followed the bumpy road deeper into the forest. My phone had no signal and I soon dozed off.

A brisk dusk was turning to nightfall by the time the car stopped at our accommodation. A simple and small building in the middle of a steep paved street, surrounded by similar looking buildings forming a small mountain town. A nice man received us and helped us with our luggage. He looked surprised to see us for some reason. Instead of entering through the front door he apologised and asked us to follow him through a balcony around the side of the building to a room in the back. It was simple und humble, but more than enough for two guys fighting to keep their eyelids open. We still mustered the courage to get some dinner in the town's only open restaurant before calling it an early night.

Our alarms rang just a few hours later. A jeep came to pick us up at 2 in the morning. After filling the jeep with a few more tourists we took off up the mountain. As time went by, the trip became progressively more chaotic. It's strange to see so many jeeps going up the mountain at 3 or 4 a.m., in a place otherwise very wild. The ride ended on a narrow mountain road so full of traffic that our jeep came to a stop. We agreed on a time to meet our driver and walked up the rest of the way until we found a nice viewpoint over the whole crater.

We sat on the ground for a couple of hours, soaking in the view. At 5 a.m. the dawn came with amazing purple, red and yellow colours, made more dramatic by the huge crater filled with mist that spanned the whole view in front of us. In the middle of it, 2 small chimneys stood out, the smallest of which was visibly active. Its plume of smoke rising to the sky and blending with the sunrise colours so peacefully that it almost felt like someone was brewing coffee inside. Pale mountains were visible farther towards the horizon. One of them was mount Ijen, another volcano that we would see up close pretty soon. As the sun rose the colours shifted across the sky, and the mist below us dissipated revealing a brown ground with a little green mixed in, sliced by dirt roads used by the jeeps.

We met back with our driver that took us down to the crater where we stopped to explore and hike up to the edge of the active chimney. Getting up to the edge felt like standing on the event horizon of a blackhole — one more step forward off the ledge and nothing would stop the slide down the steep inner walls towards the smoky bubbly hole a few hundred metres below us. We couldn't see the inside of it, but the boiling sound and the smoke heavy with the smell of sulphur curbed any desire of getting any closer.

On the way back Vasco flexed his haggling skills to buy a sweater from one of the local merchants before we jumped back in our Jeep to drive down the mountain. Our next stop would be an even more hardcore volcano.Read more