by
evilhippy
@ 2008-06-26 - 10:11:32
Major shock to the system, but I've only gone done things, and those things involved stuff, also wossnames. Too many metasyntactic variables there for my liking too, so I’ll elaborate.
Stunningly, I have actually done quite a bit so I have to rein in the jokes, I'm sure none of you were laughing all that much anyway, in an effort to get it all into one thingy, post, article, entry, wossname.
I've been out of touch from an internet connection in remote rivers, mountain villages and the like, or otherwise occupied for a week and a half now apart from a brief sashay into the old www back in Yogyakarta. But I am getting ahead of myself.
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After the total non-event that was Pontianak I flew into a little town called Pangkalan Bun (boy were my arms tired) in a little propellor plane (I was lying just then), and it was wonderful. If I find an internet connection capable of more than checking my email, and that can be a tentative process itself, I might get back on those photos and show you the views, along with the best of the other thousand or so pictures since Cambodia, but given the limited time I'll spend in Australia plus the state of phone lines in this country it'll not be until I settle in New Zealand that I can catch up.
Still, by that time I'll have stopped being all adventurous and debonair so I wont have anything else worth showing off about 
In case you were wondering, I’m in Bali just now.
So into Pangkalan Bun solely for the purpose of seeing orangutans in nearby Tanjung Puting national park, and it looked to be a protracted and long-winded process. The Lonely Planet laid out all the information but in the light of day it didn't exactly look like a a cakewalk; prices in Rupiah here kids; as you had to photocopy your passport and visa [4,000]; register at the police station and also at the PHKA (Indonesia's national parks association) offices [75,000 per day] which each required a taxi trip out of town [another 5000 each]; get a registered guide, a mandatory expense these days [225,000+ per day!], and hire a klotok [450,000 per day!!] which is a sleep-aboard river boat to get yourself the 50km or so up the river to the various camps and stations inside Tanjung Puting.
Or of course I could hire a cheaper speedboat [50,000 a day] and spend the nights in one of the two lodges on the river, but these clock in at around 300,000 a night and anyway, doing the thing by riverboat is obviously the better experience. One of these lodges was ambitiously priced at US $100, a depressing 900,000 rupiah per night, although you would at least be surrounded by some seriously spendy tourists, there then being the unscrupulous possibility of knocking one of them off for their travel goodies. Who says a river full of man-eating crocodiles has to be just a fact of life?
One of us could have gone for a swim at least.
A British tourist became hearty brunch for a croc a couple of years back, right at Camp Leakey, the main research and visitor centre, so not only do we all know the crocs are man-eating but also that proactively testing the story is likely to end messily.
So I was happy when the Lonely Planet proved its worth (it has done rather the opposite since, typically enough) and recommended a hotel with very good prices, free tea and coffee and amazingly helpful staff. I would highly recommend Hotel Tiara in P.B. if you ever visit the park, much as they recommended a travel tour chappie who took care of all the above, for a three day trip, initially for Rp. 3,900,000 which is about right given inflation, LP ineptitude and maybe just a little Tourist Exploitation Tax. They are especially adept at weaving the TET into things in this country. (I’ll be getting my rant on shortly )
When he told me the day after arranging it that an English couple had come in on the boat as well and the price was to be just Rp. 2,500,000 now I was suitably chuffed, and even more so when Mike and Kelly turned out to be the fellow Brits and were excellent company, to the point that I sort-of piggybacked on their plans (although I was going to the same places anyway I would undoubtedly have frittered away much time sorting it out) and got to the next couple of destinations in their company, the poor people.
Three days we had on the river, our guide was knowledgeable and unfailingly polite and helpful (apart from occasionally mistranslating the odd question but fair enough, we couldn't ask in his language and he was pretty good at ours), the rest of the crew were efficient and immensely polite, and the food was remarkably good, something I was not expecting at all.
It contained lots of real vegetables somehow not withered to a state of total vitamin elimination as is usually the case, and somehow these guys had managed to escape the fate of all their fellow countryfolk left in charge of a wok, and avoided that pathological addiction to grease, clarified butter and triple-frying any and every thing that looks edible, which is what distinguishes the bulk of Indonesian cuisine from everything else except pure lard.
Everything was of course still fried but it tasted of food, which is certainly not par for the course around here. I'm not a fan of most Indonesian stuff unless it's from a warung stall (variable but usually good) or a hideously expensive restaurant, or is a half decent sate (peanut satay sauce) dish and sometimes this is the worst choice you can make.
I'm still a gastronomical philistine, I'm afraid, now pass the steak pies if you would be so kind.
The park and the orangutans and the gibbons, vivid blue mushrooms, leeches, giant wild hogs (very giant), banyan and rubber trees, lianas, ironwoods and everything else of the flora and fauna persuasion was wonderful, mesmerising, and abundant. Except the blue mushroom, I only saw one of those.
All else was visible in large doses, and I couldn't really explain how it looked and felt and do it justice except that the orangutans are amazing creatures, so human at times it seems impossible, and the various feedings, of which there were about five, saw us in close proximity to up to seven or eight oranges at a time, in one case I got to within two feet of a big male and yes, I have photographic evidence to prove it
We couldn't touch them for fear of passing on a disease which they couldn't handle, and anyway the males have eight times our strength and the pint-sized females four times that of a full grown man, so while I could barely bench press their youngest offspring they could cheerfully lift four or five of me and/or tear me into little pieces, while stiff eating a couple of bananas with their feet.
They are, in short, talented creatures, and I've got plenty of photos and video to show you later on.
Gibbons are apparently rarely seen in the park, but one of them swung into camp Leakey in that carefree way that they have, snuck under the roof timbers of the food hut and swiped a bunch of bananas, the cheeky sod. Got it on camera afterwards, a video well worth seeing. (I have got to get to a real damn broadband connection.)
On the third day (yea, and we were resurrected, verily, if only from another fairly inadequate night's sleep) the guide chappie took us off into the rainforest for a bit of a proper trek. Every time we had visited a feeding site in the forest we had walked 1 - 2 kilometres into the park to reach it, but this wasn't about the orangs for once, but more about simply being there in the jungle soaking up the atmosphere and quite literally sweating it out again. The humidity was pretty high but not as bad as I was expecting and the thickness of forest on either side, the lianas trailing down from almost every tree; and the apes really do swing on them a la Tarzan and use thin, tough trees in the most incredibly refined way to move through the jungle; and the occasional exotic bit of plantlife as well as hundreds of lurid butterflies and the occasional retiring gibbon up in the trees made it one of the best walks in the woods I have ever had.
I even only got one leech, which was nice. Quite how it managed to fix one end a good three inches below my boot-top I will never know, but it removed only a modest amount of my lovely plasma before I called time at the bar and pulled it off.
All this time on the boat, three days including the early start on the first, I was getting up early. Two nights spent on the roof of the boat, curved the wrong way to not somnambulate into watery oblivion but thankfully equipped with side rails, wasn't great for a good night's sleep, so I don’t believe I had one. And of course the rules of daily life were once more electricity-independent, more or less, meaning that we woke with the sun and went to bed with the darkness, except of course we didn't because that would have been ridiculous. Still, we did have to turn in at the sort of time that would make a pensioner point and laugh, but at least we also woke up well in time for anything, including sunrise. This early start thing was to become a bit of a habit.
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Back at the hotel after the third day and we, Mike, Kelly and yours truly, needed to get from Borneo to Java, and that was to be done by sea. The government-run shipping operation is called Pelni, or the boats are Pelni ships, or something like that. Either way, there was a big floating pointy metal tub to take us to Java the very next day, and as was to become a feature of our lives it required us getting up at stupid-O'clock in the morning.
The ship booking office was in the next town half an hour's drive away, and the boat was due to leave at 7am and we needed tickets, also having to factor in both Asia Time and potential TET-related shenanigans, so we got up about 5. In the morning. When it wouldn't turn out to be necessary to do so for, ooh, hours. Hmph.
Getting to the ticket office in the next town was hindered slightly by our driver's attempts at getting a little TET for himself. He drove us past the official Pelni office, around the back of the town where we weren't supposed to know where we were, and stopped next to a private travel agent and began pretending not to speak any English. All he did was sort of imply we had to get tickets here ("tickets" - pointing to private business) or go back the way we came ("you walk" - pointing down a road we hadn't even arrived by.)
This goes on all the time and private agents - who he would of course get a percentage of the overcharging from if we bought anything there - exist pretty much entirely because of the Tourist Exploitation Tax maneuvrings of everyone along the chain; from hotels to taxis to touts to members of the public to the agents and even the ships themselves, or at least the people who work on them.
Fair enough we earn more than they do but that's hardly a system for the real world ("Say, Mr. Gates, could I have half a million quid? I understand you earn more than I do") but the ones on the TET bandwagon are never seen doing any work. Ever. Beyond handling large wads of tourist's money of course
The ship was set for departure at 7am, we were in the Pelni office at about 6:40, and were told it would now leave at 8. I sensed that dimension-ripping brand of physics that heralds the presence of a pocket of Asia Time.
We got aboard and the time of departure was soon announced as 9am. We had woken up at 05:00 especially to be in time so it was with a sense of resignation that this happened.
We ended up actually leaving at just past 12:40pm, a mere five-and-a-half hours after it was scheduled. Asia Time had won out again.
Bitterness and cynicism aside (ha!) the ship was rather good, despite being extremely basic. It took 24 hours to get to Java across the flamboyantly named Java Sea, and life aboard was amicable and easy, if a little boring. We had our own cabin (because I could tell the economy/steerage/live cargo class would be the best place to be mugged, killed and dumped overboard) and strolling the gangways on the edge of the vessel on the few passenger decks was extremely pleasant, even though I was constantly stared at by every single other person aboard. I think it may have been the first time many of them had seen a white person, or at least one absentmindedly mooching around a ship pretending to be a pirate, which I did quite a bit of and it was immense fun. I wish I'd had a cutlass but I was afraid the other passengers might take it the wrong way.
The one thing I had hoped to be seeing less of was the intolerable lack of religious tolerance (i.e. towards orthodox fundamentalist atheists like myself) and general nauseous piety of the muslim community, which sadly seems to be most of the country's population. The muezzin had made it seaward with the rest of us, and there were a good few prayers both morning and night, probably to urge their non-existent beardy* Lord to let them safely arrive at port.
I didn't notice anyone praying to the God of Maritime Engineering, but I was holding back a little nautical ditty in my mind just in case he/she/it turned out to be needed. If you're gonna worship some arbitrary wossname then you may as well make it actually good for something, eh?
*Of course the beard isn't certain, what with the idea of images in Islam being touchy at best. But it sounds better, and anyway, people with beards are probably all hiding something so Allah would need a pretty substantial one to obscure the fact he doesn't really exist 
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We docked in Surabaya, where Mike and Kelly had spent the past year teaching English, and immediately ran away via that lovely Javanese railway network as Surabaya isn't worth any time to speak of, and they’d be the ones to know. It's a major port and the approach by sea is impressive for the sheer scale of shipping opereations, the vast floating jetties maybe a mile out from the dockside, the mammoth extent of the docks and the unbelievably huge oil stacks and storage towers, but these a tourist destination hardly makes, so we buggered off.
The trains are pretty good as expected, like the ship I was ready for economy class and the unsightly chewing of fallen passenger's limbs or wholesale mass begging, so we tried the business class and it was a lot like the old British Rail exterior-handle, sash-window'ed carriages but with less charm, although it does have nifty folding seat backs so any two bench seats on the same side can be made into either a 4-person space or two rows of 2-seaters. Aside from that it was as pleasant a six hour journey as can be had on rails that occasionally tilt over to a frightening degree. It must have gone up about 15 degrees on one side at times, and apart from uncomfortably twisting the spine it does dark things indeed for one's bladder control.
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Yay Yogyakarta! Pronounce it `JogJakarta` though, or just Jogja, as everyone calls it. It is a relaxing city despite the bustle, with a calm and easygoing atmosphere even despite the massive overabundance of becaks (bicycle rickshaws who like to risk your life rather than theirs in traffic; you are in front in the impact zone while they peddle half-blindly from behind) and their overeager drivers.
It was very pleasant and reassuringly lively place even when we arrived at around 8 at night, and had a proper backpacker's area, essentially one street with some well-equipped lanes leading from it.
There were a huge variety of hostels, hotels and homestays, and it's just a pity that the place we wanted from the book was the only one who hadn't invested in an illuminated sign, and was set back from the road in the darkness. We ended up in a truly nasty little place that was at least cheap [50,000 per night], but offered virtually nothing more more than a roof, and only barely that.
The next day we were going to Borobudur and needed (yet another) early start, so it didn't matter much. Mike stepped into the breach first thing that next day (something around 6:30am I think) and scouted out another, better place for the next night. We were on a pair of public buses from 7:30 to 9:15 or so which took us to Borobudur, and which broadly sucked in every way. They're buses, though, so this wasn't entirely unexpected. The legroom was possibly of actual negative value in places and I had to either take up `both seats` (an area of only 2ft x 1ft) or introduce my kneecaps to my earlobes, but it was only an hour and a quarter or so each way and I have definitely done worse. Often in school I seem to remember having less fun on the bus in fact, and everyone knows they were `the best days of your life`. (I seem to have missed something crucial here because I remember them mostly as the worst, but hey. Millions of sentimentalist who never went to my school can't be wrong )
Borobudur is, if you didn't know; and if not why haven't you googled it yet; a big temple. Yes, another one. This one claims to be Buddhist but built in the Hindu style by Hindus, but I guess it’
S sort-of up for grabs as it was lost for a thousand years, and anyway it is a bit different. For one it's more of a stupa (although I'm assured by the LP it actually isn't as it was built Hindu) because it doesn't have any internal rooms or passages, it is essentially a gigantic tiered ornament, one you can walk around and that has 8 levels of galleries and thousands of metres of complex carvings, but it'd solid all the way through: it won’t keep the rain out.
The fellow shoving visitors, relentless touts; and I mean truly relentless, they will not leave you alone at all; the beggars who follow you for hundreds of metres while you completely ignore them, children of maybe 8 years old who've spent hours in the mirror practicing their most pathetic and dejected poverty-crippled expressions - I cared not for any of them. Call me cold but they can go to hell and stay there: not one of them is in any way honest, all part of either an organised scam or a private life of laziness and thievery. No, I will not listen to any special case. They can all get fucking jobs.
That aside, and I just get a little annoyed about it every once in a while as you can tell, Borobudur was untainted by that needless waste of time and effort on all sides. The monument itself is of a size I can't properly guess at, but I will anyway and say it must be about 200 metres on each side at the lowest level; a vast base on which the whole thing is built. The first level proper would be about 20m in from that.
Each consecutive level shrinks in size as it is set in from the one below, creating the wraparound walkway on that level, and every side of every level is carved, every single panel on every vertical surface showing Hindu-style scenes from the Ramayan and Mahabharata, mostly preserved well although obvious damage and repair has happened, and buddha statues line every level above these ranging along every wall, alongside thousand and thousands of stone bells, the central motif for the whole structure.
The huge stone bells at the very top are something really quite stunning, as you’ll see for yourself soon enough.
Damage is something Borobudur has seen a distressing amount of, and in a saddeningly short time. It was entirely undiscovered, covered with earth and ash, for almost 1000 years until Sir Thomas Stanford Raffles came along and unearthed it once again, proving the old boy slightly more useful than I previously thought. Since that event, in around 1880 or 1850 or some such date it has been restored, covered up, bombed and shaken by earthquakes, yet the millennium-old structure still stands and still manages to bear the ant-like hoards of tourists that visit it each day.
The lowest carvings and panels, on the sides of the massive base on which the rest is sited, show racy scenes probably from the kama sutra, or whatever incarnation the ruder depictions of the Hindu lifestyle then took. Of course, this was too much for the population to bear, or rather to much for Muslim leaders to decide everyone else could bear, so they plastered and destroyed and bricked-up this part of their thousand-year heritage. How very public-spirited, I'm sure we can all agree.
Then in the last century there was an earthquake which threatened to tear the structure in two and partly did, and then some amazingly intelligent political activists took it into their heads that the best way to attack the regime of prime minister Soeharto in the late 1980's or early 1990's (I haven't any way of checking properly right now) was to blow up this most famous and precious part of their cultural heritage.
Very publish spirited again, very well handled boys.
Of course it was the best way to draw public opinion from around the world and yes, Soeharto was a bastard dictator like many others, but I hardly think a good way to express discontent with the way your country is being handled and your way of life infringed upon is to blow up the oldest and most important symbol of your roots and the greatest historical structure you have.
Also at the site, all over the temple from top to bottom myself, Kelly and Mike became possibly more of an attraction than Borobudur itself. We were constantly approached by school-age sort of children to have their photos taken with us - giggling, almost hysteric crowds of up to a dozen at a time - so now hundreds and hundreds of kids must have at least one of us in their respective photo albums, and while we weren't quite the only Westerners at the site we were the only dashingly attractive youthful types, so I guess these guys all wanted a `big brother or sister` in the West or something. Mike and Kelly were in the lead I think, but I still must have been in around ten group pictures with various gangs of these guys. It was all slightly weird, but actually a bit of fun. My fixed shit-eating grin has indeed made it around the world
The bus back to Yogya did a funny thing too, it dropped us off about a mile and a half from where it should have. It was an easy walk up the city's main street and not exactly a problem; in fact it gave me more chance to see the city than anything; yet it is still a little rude. I can't work out why they did that, except that it could have been to save us time if there was a massive circular route to get where we wanted, and I suppose it must have been because we caught the same bus on the way out less than 20 feet from the end of the road we were staying on. Oddness.
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Away from politics and opinions and I still wasn't allowing myself any proper sleep. The day after Borobudur I woke up at 8am automatically after a fairly late night before watching half a season of the US doctor drama House, once again, because Hugh laurie really is rather good in it. After mooching without much of an agenda exploring the streets nearby, I stumbled across an internet cafe that proclaimed to have WiFi (where the last entry was posted from) but actually had a series of laptops all plugged into a network in its upstairs room. I think the subtleties of the world of geeks is yet to make much headway in this country, which at least leaves only part-qualified geeks to pretend to know more than we do, which might come in handy.
I wanted to write this much up by then but couldn't face it and knew I couldn't do it justice - I'm still pretty sure I haven't done it justice, but I get a second shot from a different angle when I post the photos (sometime in 2010) and they really shouldn't undersell what's happened so far.
And they certainly shouldn't undersell the next thing: I was off to Mount Bromo.
That 8am start on not-enough-for-proper-functioning sleep led me, after a day of beer and mooching, to catch my executive class train (individual seats, reclining to near-horizontal but with a pointless footstand completely ruining all the extra space and legroom, or at least ruining it for a guy not built on Indonesian proportions) at 01:05am having not yet slept. I didn't sleep on the 6-hour train back to Surabaya either, nor at the station there although I did get to hear the immensely annoying Big-Ben tune played in monophonic monotony over and over and over and over and over again. Fucking tune.
Every time an announcement is made it is played 3 or 4 times in a row, an annoying synthesised beeping slog through the chiming tune of our fine nation's parliamentary clock tower, something I simply cannot fathom for reason, repitition or violation of basic human rights and sanity.
The next train on to a town called Probolinggo left at half past nine, two hours later I found myself in the town with the worst bus station in Indonesia, facing a bus journey to Mount Bromo I couldn’t avoid. Probolinggo bus terminal is famed far and wide for being the home to the worst scammers and rip-offs Indonesia has to offer. Yaaa-aaaaayyyy.
Yet, I'm a lucky bastard, aren't I? Outside the station a guy had a car and spoke near-perfect English, and wanted 175,000 to go the village on the lip of the Bromo caldera. I wasn't paying that and as luck would have it Mr. Car chappie had spotted some other white people, or rather one white chap, a Swede by the name of Erik.
My god he seemed dull - and I know I can't draw the typical conclusion because I've met a few swedes, one of them was my tattoist in India, and they are largely pretty lively funny folk - I think he was just middle-aged and probably has had an office job tabulating protons or something for too many of his years, but I guess when it comes down to it it’s fair to say that the Swedish have a special kind of dull. Sadly this seems to be the only kind of Swede most people remember.
Nonetheless I wasn't going to abandon the obvious financial advantage of listening to him for an hour in the car, and as he had his kids with him; both half-Indonesian so I guess he must have married here some time ago, the kids were quite old and his Bahasa Indonesia was perfect; it only cost me 50,000 rupiah after all. We stopped on the advice of Erik to book onwards tickets via bus to Bali, and even at 150,000 for that trip I was damned happy, mostly because it takes me straight across the ferry and takes all the worry out of it and, mainly, because it was done. I was having mild bouts of panic that I wouldn't get to Denpasar in bali in time for my flight on Friday, and this bus drops me right there by about 6am Thursday so unless I do anything really spectacular, I shouldn't have any problems.
Then again, you know what they say when you ASSUME anything (it makes an ASS out of U and Me with thanks to the good lord Sammy L. Jackson, once again)
Getting in to a village called Cemoro Lawang by car with the Swedes, and we were set down outside what turns out to be the most popular, worst value hotel in town. There are only five hotels - all really hostels, not hotels at all - and a few homestays, but still this place manages to come bottom of the league by some considerable margin.
Looks like a little extra TET is the order of the day as this is the place Mr. Car man came to without being asked, but I was expecting as much anyway. I wasn't expecting there to be absolutely no heating at all and nothing between the outside and inside worlds but windows that don't close, walls made out of a single sheet of hardboard, bare concrete floors and a door with half an inch of light coming through on two sides. And please do bear in mind that we are 2500 metres above sea level and right in the middle of the clouds, they literally roll straight through the hilltop and blanket the ground in every part of the village.
The altitude, although relatively modest by climbing standards still half-crippled me while walking around the steep streets and all the hills and slopes were virtually lethal to my ailing respiratory system. Then again maybe I’m just really, really unfit. The locals surely all had a good laugh though so at least it was of some good to someone.
One night there was more than enough, the night-time temperature is about 8 degrees celsius and it is, absolutely literally, the exact same temperature outside as inside. I'd just come from ground-level Surabaya with temperatures of 28+ degrees, and to be introduced to this cold was not much fun; it wouldn't be worth mentioning were it not for the fact there were holes everywhere in my room and no heating. Such things hypothermia is born of, or at least a very bad temper.
Now after all those early starts, about seven in a row by now, I probably deserved a lie-in, which is why I woke up the next day at 03:00am. I was told to do this by someone who has let me down time and time again - I officially hate the Lonely Planet like no man has hated a printed product ever before. Part of its problem lies in the fact that you know some of the information is dead right but can't tell what bit that is. The other part is that the authors have clearly never been there, wherever there is. I understand there is some controversy going on about this in the press, and I would dearly love to be able to cruise through Youtube in a few months and see the guilty party standing briefly against a wall wearing a blindfold.
Getting up and being outside, having dressed in total darkness because the far-seeing operators of that trainwreck of a hostel turn off all power at 11pm and don’t give it back until dawn, despite the fact they purposely wake all their guests up - and this is the best bit, whether they like it or not - at 03:30am, I found myself cursing them all to eternal damnation and about to face the walk to mount Bromo.
It may be worth mentioning here that the attraction of Bromo is that it is an active volcano, or at least a partially active one; a smoker, if you will.
The relatively low crater is ash-grey and immensely wide, almost half a kilometre in diameter, and belches out an unending stream of sulphurous smoke and steam from a deep fissure within the mass of spidery cracks in the crater floor. That in itself isn't the main attraction though, the overall setting is the real draw and it is a lot like the scene at the end of the third Lord of the Rings film: this place could almost, with a bit of moody lighting, pass for the land of Mordor. I was never going to miss out.
The general ground-plan of the area is that of a gigantic caldera; a volcanic crater from an eons-old eruption that would have shaken the ground for thousands of miles. The volcano that once stood here can only be glimpsed at the outer edges of the caldera where the lip of mountains that ring the area still stand, and from the scale of those hills the original volcano; that exploded entirely casting all the material in it up to hundreds of miles away; must have been around 14 kilometres in diameter, about 9 miles across. What is left of it was nothing at all for a full 10 kilometres within the crater, suggesting an explosion well beyond human imagination.
Pressure beneath the surface had been mostly alleviated by this, and the few lesser thrusts from the land of magma and Jules Verne novels pushed up a few smaller peaks, some of them lazily smeared out through the caldera floor over a lot of time such as Bromo (although probably featuring a fairly recent an explosion of its own, given the wide, low crater and unworn sharply crevassed slopes on the side of the approach) and some more or less poked up instantly then naturally capped off, like the striking perfectly-conical mountain covered almost top to bottom in grass and low foliage, standing twice as high as and immediately before Bromo from where the village sits on the caldera rim.
The land between the rim and Bromo or the conical mountain is a pretty impressive plain, the Sea of Sand as they call it (really powdered black volcanic ash, but who's checking) and it stretchs for about 2.5km between where you start from the edge of the village and the lowest slopey paths of Bromo. This was a somewhat crucial detail for what was to follow, for me and two hapless fellow travellers, but at least we all had company.
More important for what transpired yesterday morning was that the Sea of Sand also extends about 10 kilometers or so to the right side of Mt. Conical Green Thing, and that the width starts at the same two-and-a-half kilometres and doesn't narrow much for a good few miles. This proved to be quite important indeed.
The approach to this site was a bit convoluted and an early start was needed. Good job I was already in the habit. What you are told, by anyone and everyone is that the approach is easy and well marked. They lie of course, every one of them. The fact that most everyone except me and a couple of English guys, or rather an English couple by the name of Lou and Sam, could find this phantom route in sheer darkness I think reflects not on our ineptitude, but rather a larger-scale ity that doesn't rely on much thought or logic but merely a blind optimism that, for one thing, doesn't come all that naturally to the English.
Everyone else here so far is either French, American, German, Swedish, Saudi, or of course Indonesian. The hard-wired cynicism that comes from being an English person living beneath English weather for a couple of decades simply doesn't occur to non-anglicised people, and unlike us they will gladly follow instructions in a fairly basic way without getting distracted by inconsistencies of detail. Like people outrageously lying to you, for an example just off the top of my head.
I think that's what led poor Sam and Lou off track in the first place, that and stumbling in very heavy mist at 4am well before any hope of proper light, also I think they had been given a paraplegic glow-worm for a torch suppplied as part of the deal which was especially considerate of the hotel staff, once again.
The mist was the killer though - visibility, although the sky was light for the hour thannks to the moon's reflected light coming evenly through the clouds above us in every direction, was limited to about 15 feet at best on the ground, and at eye-level we may as well have been blind because the mist, literally a dense ground-hugging cloud, made everything identical in all directions for every direction and viewpoint but that of the crater floor for a few feet all around.
I have a very good torch, it can quite literally blind a person and will illuminate surfaces up to 150 feet away (I bought all my travel gear; torches, knife, boots, thermals, survival gear; more-or-less military grade so I wouldn't have to buy any of it again) but this was uselss, possibly even less so. One of the properties of water vapour like fog or clouds is that strong light instantly becomes counterproductive as it glares of the hanging vapour seemingly inches away from the bulb. Perhaps this is why we got totally lost in the mist and pre-darkness in a fairly epic way, and walked, I would estimate, about 7 kilometres in the wrong direction, leaving us at the wrong end of the crater, on the wrong side of the wrong mountain, without a clue, a hope or, at one point it seemed, even a prayer.
That much was at least appropriate because I'd asked a few too many from the great Norris lately, Our Lord S. L. Jackson only helps out in moments of critical dialogue failure, and all the rest of course are made up
What went wrong was really threefold, fourfold if you factor in our collective massive intelligence and ability to confuse ourselves with perfectly rational logic. The first thing that screwed us was, inevitably, The Lonely Planet guidebook.
They suggest that you "get up at 04:30, or even earlier..." and people of practical mind and adequate intelligence would of course happily start at 03:30 and not only have the chance to take it seriously easy but also beat all but every other person to the crater, as is the very strong suggestion in this book and from other travellers.
Now I don't wish you to believe I hold all other travellers in low regard because they managed to do something that I could not, because this would be supremely arrogant and naive and in fact isn't actually so. All I am asking you to believe is that when going about a slightly unusual journey in a country that is not your own it takes a certain kind of person to blindly follow directions without thought, and another kind to evaluate things constantly as you go along. It's just a pity we should have been shortsighted and dumbly trusting this time out.
The book made mention of some white stones; this proved crucial too. When you follow the track down to the Sea of Sand you are directed by the only possible road towards a line of white stone pillars, short bollards really, leading off quite sharply to the right.
You have been todl to find the white stones and follow them to Bromo.
You see these white stone pillars, leading mostly to the right but also clearly away from the cliffs where you started.
What do you do?
I'd like to think that most people would think to follow these white stone bollards, but it appears not to be so. Maybe it was just especially misty and that was what is behind it all, or whether everyone else is given good information (for the record, the hotel clearly told me to follow the white markers too. Then again, the same guy told me to go the absolute wrong direction to get down the cliff in the first place when I set off at 3:30 in the morning and perfect darkness and I guess I should have factored this in, but hey.) and I was not, neither were the other two, but however the rest of humanity manages it we did not.
We later learned, saw from our mounts as we rode past in fact (wait for it... ) that the `white stones` did exist but upon reaching the white bollards, hundreds of regular identical officially concreted-in pillars, the line of white stones everyone is actually talking about leads directly forward rather than off to the right does not begin for a good 40 feet past that line of bollards, at 90 degrees to it leading enthusiatically off in the correct direction, rather then the one I went in. You cannot see these stones everyone mentions though because visibility does not allow it, all you see are those bollards....
I belabour the point because it's quite obvious we were already being totally screwed by those in the know. Perhaps the villagers wanted a bit more of a laugh at my expense, me sweating to death in the 10-degree chill dragging myself up and down their streets not hilarious enough yet
I trudged the line of pillars for ten minutes, an early jeep passed me which was reassuring in that this was the road to somewhere although by that point of course I had no idea I was being set up and after a little while more in the cold, really quite cold darkness, walking stoically through the centre of a mass of cloud, I picked out some life and it turned out to be two English types; Lou and Sam.
It occured to me a bit later that morning, when we had negotiated the crater at long last and worked out a) how much we had fucked up, b) how much other people had fucked us over, and not to mention the all-important c) which fucking way to get back, that meeting people the way we did was unusual but unusually interesting.
Imagine it, you're walking in a possibly hostile environment in virtual blindness searching for something you can't see, and don't know the location of even vaguely as by this point you have been directed a quarter-circle off course by bad information and all judgments are fatally impaired. You meet people up to the same silly task, but you can't see them. I mean, you can't really see them - you have no idea how old they are, what they look like, what kind of clothes or style or image they have, and most importantly you can't see their facial expressions, and cannot interpret their body language with any skill. You just have to get along without any of the normal assumptions and judgments we would normally make.
It is unusual, maybe there's even something to learn from that.
So on we walked, reached the end of the white bollards, decided somewhat uncertainly to venture off to the right, and intercepted a passing motorbike, part of a small convoy, asked directions and were told to go the way we'd just elected to, off to the right.
This guy was who properly fucked us over because we had already gone well past Bromo and needed to go left and in fact backwards a bit, too. With a cheery smile he, a local, directed us off into the vastness of the barren crater floor, and so it began anew. A mile or two further on we found another helpful chap who also told us to keep going this way to Bromo - we were almost precisely 180 degrees off course and kept going, thinking after a while that the huge shadow we could see on our right must be the conical mountain, as it would be according to our `guides` instructions, and kept going and going and going and, well, not only were we over hill and through briar for several hours, in shifting sands and awkward terrain all 'round, but the sunrise, due to the altitude, the caldera lip of tall hills and the insanely heavy mist, didn't even happen until nearly 45 minutes after the scheduled time and that much helped out panic along nicely.
Eventually it broke and at about 6:45, an hour and a half after actual sunrise but the only time the fog had cleared sufficiently, we saw where we were and cried/laughed. At least we could see the way back, all 4 or 5 miles of it. Hurumph.
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At great length, much like the last dozen paragraphs, Bromo happened as it should have; we missed the sunrise by quite a margin but had an extra bonus in that we got to the bottom, swallowed our pride and assessed our laziness and after all the walking we had done hired horse to get up the lower slopes and to the base of the final stairway cut into the rock leading up to the crater rim.
It must be said that the locals, with their many layers and large poncho-style hand-weaved blankets and clothes and, well, ponchos as a matter of fact, all looked decidedly Mongolian or Peruvian, as the stereotypes of those two countries would have them.
Breathing clouds of vapour into chilly air while standing in brightly-coloured woven ponchos on a flat ashen plateau standing next to a tiny horse, these guys looked every inch the mountainous, stereotypically Mongolian tribesmen.
Regrettably someone had taught them how to charge to tourists, but it was still only a few quid and the ride, from which I have a couple of video posts for you all to laugh at, was enjoyable even if the horses were clearly part-mad.
They liked to break from walk to canter without warning and mine in particular had not only acceleration to match a performance motorcar, but an unnecessarily competitive nature, and whenever Sam pulled up level with me on his mount mine would surge ahead, and always had to be in front. A little one-upmanship in the animal world too, you see, which matches my personality quite nicely My horse also was unable to desist from farting hugely. I dare not draw any further comparisons.
Just to prove how psychotic these animals were, unfortunately, Lou's horse went a little crazy and while I saw it bucking and became concerned, I didn’t see it thrash so madly that she had to jump off, landing on her head - all was good, Lou was the most experienced rider out of our trio and the only one who probably could have jumped from the thing, but still. No hard hats, tetchy horse, steep hills; on reflection it wasn't such a great idea, but hey.
The views, and pictures, are fantastic if I do say so myself. That's what really made it all worthwhile of course, and of course we have some pictures from angles no-one else will have, even if we did have to get massively lost and inconvenienced to achieve 'em.
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The next day I took it fairly easy, mooched around working out how awful the food was in every place in the village, and moved to the other main hostel which was by comparison a palace, still cold as hell but the room and staff and even some of the menu was fantastic, and not too expensive either.
Waiting around for the 3:30pm bus back to Probolinggo and my pre-booked coach to Bali, I got chatting a Dutch girl and waited the inevitable extra time for the minibus to arrive. At 4:10 or thereabouts we set off, and managed to squeeze, at the most entertaining point, 27 people into a minibus the size of a Ford Galaxy, it having been altered to fit in 5 rows of tiny bench seats.
Two hours like this with my stomach telling me it had a large delivery for the next toilet, cramped up with my knees being prised apart by carefully-placed bars in the seat in front, wasn't actually all that bad, although I did run across a busy highway to get to the toilet when we arrived in Probo.
Asia Time proved itself unusually tricky again when my coach - advertised as First Class although I knew better - arrived two hours early and almost left without me. How the fucking be-jesus anyone is supposed to make good use of their lives when you cannot rely on anything anyone tells you regarding timescales or timetables I do not know.
It was simply luck I was there in time - and of course this proved a hellish journey.
I had very literally the worst seat on the bus. Having probably paid more than anyone else I wasn't exactly happy, but mostly I wasn't happy because the, if you'll pardon the term I'm reading the Godfather at the moment, the goddamn shylocking sonsabitches who run the thing had taken on extra cargo and the last 6 seats in the coach were taken up with boxes leaving only one seat spare.
This seat had a box wedged into the footwell so I had no legroom at all, but spent the next 10 hours twisting my spine with one leg in the aisle and one on top of the box, knee angled painfully, trying to read Mario Puzo and wishing a horse's head in the beds of everyone else aboard.
Boxes behind my seat prevented me from reclining to get more space; the only person on board who's seat was thus blocked; and directly behind me was the toilet so I couldn't shift anything and of course it smelt of piss and shit the entire time. No-one else was as close - they had left the one seat next to the toilet free and blocked the others nearby with cargo.
Just to piss me off more the guy in front reclined fully, and I had to almost stand up.
I know fairness and justice and all that don't really come into things in Asia the way we see it, but I thought it a little bit low that not only was mine the smallest and smelliest place on board but that also I was the biggest person on board, by some margin. I know it gets repeated, but it really does make a difference and I could hardly ask another passenger to swap seats (they'd be immensely dumb to do so) although it would have been really nice if people hadn't laughed at me when I was struggling to fit into the seat, as they sat there reclined and sweet-smelling, nestled within the relative vastness of their chairs.
Anyway I'm not bitter. I just left a small canister of time-release cyanide gas on board as I left, the only passenger alighting in Denpasar at 4am this morning. I hope they all have a pleasant trip 
