Mount Bromo

Of course when visiting a volcano it’s very important to check whether it is erupting before you set off… so we didn't. After 7 hours travelling we got close to Mt. Bromo and found out it was erupting, had been since around Christmas and had even grounded all flights at Denpasar airport on Bali for a while! This kind of got in the way of our plans to climb it but having come this far we decided to go up to the village nearby to see what we could do. By the time we arrived at the village it had already gone dark and we were told that we couldn’t get to the volcano but we could climb to a viewpoint overlooking it. I was happy to find we were staying in Yoschi’s Hotel, even if the spelling was slightly off. Since there was absolutely nothing to do in the village we got an early night to prepare for our pre-sunrise trek in the morning. 

The morning did not start well. We got a lift before 4 in the pitch black to the bottom of the viewpoint. Being us we hadn’t taken a torch and so had to struggle up the steep side of a slippery mountain with zero visibility apart from the little orange focus light on my camera. When we finally got to the top things only got worse. The sun made an appearance and we were greeted by a view of; nothing, absolutely nothing, there was fog so thick we could barely see a tree 5 meters down the hill. A bit of a waste of time climbing for sunrise then! Since we were up there we decided to eat our packed breakfasts a wait a while. This didn’t improve things, the breakfast was 2 slices of bread, jam and water and mine ended up starring in the picture below. 

As we were waiting around to see if it was going to clear up we were able to hear the volcano erupting, just like thunder with no lightning. After being up there for a few hours things started to look up and we caught a glimpse of the ash cloud being thrown up by the, as yet unseen, volcano. This was quickly hidden and we had to wait another hour and a half before getting any more visibility back. Though we never got a full view of everything, what we did see was still amazing, as the pictures below show.

Things didn’t get any less spectacular after we had climbed back down. In our minibus on the way back to the hotel we were suddenly able to see the extent to which the volcanic ash had covered everything in the valley. The road was under about 6 inches of ash and the whole trip back was a purely monochrome ride. When we got back to the hotel we realised that here, in the valley under the ash cloud pictured above, it was constantly “snowing” ash.