Photos: http://princeton.facebook.com/album.php?aid=2050809&l=8c97e&id=1101094
I spent the next day in a minibus bound for Gunung Bromo, a volcano in East Java. Once again I rode along with four Frenchmen (the French are everywhere here), and I spent most of the morning talking with two of them about my trip to India; they planned to go there next and wanted some advice.
We stopped at a roadside restaurant for lunch, but I soon realized that I didn’t have enough rupiah left to pay for my meal. I asked around and the nearest ATM was a couple miles down the road, but one guy volunteered to drive me there on the back of his motorbike. It was my first time on the back of a bike, and it was a nerve-wracking experience, mostly because the guy drove like a crazy person. But I made it back to the restaurant just fine and had a meal of nasi goreng (friend rice with egg) and jackfruit.
We arrived at our losmen just after nightfall, and I spent the evening talking with a pair of travelers from Ireland and Canada and their Australian “tour leader.” A tour leader? You mean a tour guide? No, no, not a tour guide. A tour leader.
“What’s the difference?” I asked.
“A tour guide has to know everything about the places she takes her tour group. A tour leader doesn’t.”
“So what do they pay you for?”
The tour leader scowled at me and said very little else for the rest of the conversation.
The following morning we woke up at 4am to watch the sun rise over the volcanic landscape. I found the views stunning, but I’ll let my photos speak for themselves.
Minibuses drove us from our sunset viewpoint to the base of Gunung Bromo, and we started our hike up the volcano from there. The base of the mountain was otherworldly—shrouded in clouds and sulfur fumes, I could hardly see ten feet in front of me, and every few seconds an Indonesian cowboy would ride by on his horse, his face covered in a turban. I hiked for a while, and then decided it would be fun to ride a horse up the mountain, so I got the attention of one of the cowboys and made the rest of the journey on horseback. The highlight of the morning was a Malaysian guy asking me to take his picture, taking his hands off the reins to wave, and promptly falling off his horse. I tried not to laugh too hard.
At the peak of the volcano I was able to look down into the cone and see the smoke billowing out, but there was no lava spewing up like at Volcán Pacayas in Guatemala. Still, it was an impressive site.
I ate breakfast back at the losmen with my French friends, and then caught a bus bound for Bali. Next stop, Lovina.
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