One of my housemates is leaving soon. She's been my friend and travel partner since I arrived in Indonesia and I'm very sad to see her go. She's only got a couple of weeks left and there was one place she hadn't been to yet that she really wanted to see: Mount Bromo. Bromo is an active volcano in East Java that sits inside a massive caldera with two other volcanoes that are dormant. Bromo's top was blown off at some point and sulfuric steam rises out if it, making the air smell yummy.
Bromo is a famous spot to see the sun rise because the clouds and fog form a sea-like blanket for the peaks as morning breaks. On a good day, it looks like this. We, unfortunately did not have a good day, but more on that later. First, the journey.
Java is a big island. It's 51,000 square miles big. I'm not sure what that means, exactly. I had to look it up. But I know it's big. We can get from Jakarta, on the north coast, to Pelabuhan Ratu, on the south coast, in three to four hours. But to go from west to east takes much, much longer. Especially if you're traveling by train.
We'd been trying all week to get the train schedules but the beautifully-designed Web site isn't updated and you can't get through on the telephone. So, we turned up at the station at 7:30 pm and crossed our fingers that we would get a seat on a very full train, which we did. Our train left central Jakarta at 9:30 pm on Friday night. When traveling by train, there are three different fare choices. The first is economy. It's ridiculously cheap (a few dollars to go hundreds of miles) and, as a result, also ridiculously crowded. People are packed in like sardines, standing, sitting on floors, and hanging out the doors and windows of the un-air-conditioned cars. Brave souls sometimes sit on top. I suppose if you can managed not to fall off, it's probably the coolest and most comfortable seat on the train. The second choice for a ticket is business class. The cars in business class are also not air conditioned and the seats don't recline. But the windows open and they don't overbook, like in economy. It costs about $16 for a one-way ticket and my travel partner had taken a business-class night train to Yogyakarta survived, so we were going to try it. But the business class was sold out.
So, we went with executive class. The tickets are expensive--$33 one way--and there is no doubt that it is the most comfortable option. It's air-conditioned to such an uncomfortable degree that every rider is provided a blanket and pillow. The seats recline and there is ample leg room, along with a foot rest. I slept a good deal during the ten-hour trip that took eleven and a half hours. Trains to Surabaya and back, as I learned last weekend, are notorious for running late.
Surabaya is the second largest city in Indonesia, after Jakarta, and, like Jakarta, there does not appear to be all that much of interest to the average tourist. It didn't really matter to us, because it was only the first stop on our journey to Bromo. At the train station, our first order of business was to find a place to sit down for a minute . The train finally arrived at about 9 am and we were ready for coffee. Our plan was to study the map while we drank so as to plan our next leg. It's not the best idea to spend a lot of time advance planning while traveling through Indonesia because things never turn out like you expect them to. For someone like me, whose planning skills border on the obsessive, it's been a difficult lesson to learn. But I'm trying.
Of course, as soon as we walked through the station doors into Surabaya, there were a hundred or so men shouting at us. "Taxi, miss? Bromo? Bali? Where you go? Taxi? You need taxi? Bromo? Yogya? Taxi?" We told them, "No," in several different ways, in Indonesian, and started walking away in no particular direction. It's difficult to pause even to look around and make a decision which way to walk, because as soon as you do so, you'll be surrounded by a group of taxi drivers or tour guides, offering assistance that you don't necessarily want.
So we ended up walking out to the main road and circling back around to a small, roadside, outdoor restaurant where we ordered coffee and tried to figure out how to get to the bus station using public transportation. An old man sat down next to us and asked us where we were going. He was nice and we chatted with him and the ladies who were serving coffee for a few minutes. People are always impressed when we can speak Indonesian to them. But the questions are always the same, so it's easy to commit the answers to memory! "Where are you from?" "How long have you lived in Indonesia?" And finally, "Do you need a taxi?" Of course, the old man wasn't just being chatty. He wanted to take us to our next destination.
Taxis in Indonesia all have meters. But the drivers will sometimes try to arrange a fare without using the meter. From the airport in Jakarta to my house, I don't have such a problem with this, because I know about what I would pay if the meter were on. But in a new city, I always feel like I'm getting taken advantage of, so I prefer the meter, even if it means I'm going to pay more. And, as the old man was talking to us, we were still trying to figure out how we might take a city bus from the train station to the bus station.
By the time we finished our coffee, we had given up. We declined the old man's offer, since he wouldn't agree to use the meter, and went in search of a taxi. The gang in front of the train station had disappeared, hanging out somewhere until the next train arrived, so we hailed a cab from the street and were on our way. At the bus station, buses to Probolinggo, leave constantly. One fills up and leaves and the next empty bus pulls into the station. We got there just as one was filling up. There was only one seat left and there were two of us. My instinct in these situations is always to wait for the next bus. But in Indonesia, there always seems to be another place to sit. Since my friend got on the bus first, they ushered her to the empty seat. Me, they turned around and guided to the front, where a porter's seat was mysteriously unfolded, just next to the driver.
My friend thought this was cool and she was somewhat jealous. It's true that the seat was comfortable and I wasn't crammed in, like I would have been in the back. I also had a great view out the front window of the bus. I could see the scenery and I could watch, for three hours, as the driver ran motorcycles, bicycles, and other cars practically off the road, as he laid on the horn and made unbelievably unsafe decisions about passing, all in an effort to make up time. We'd spent the first hour in a traffic jam, which made hours two and three a bit traumatic. I'm sure he has driven in the same seemingly crazy and erratic way many, many times. But I'm equally sure that I saw my life flash before my eyes multiple times. I visualized myself flying through the windshield as we collided with oncoming traffic and, as I often find myself doing in Indonesia, I thought of my mom and how horrified she would be if she knew how unsafe the roads are here. But, we made it to Probollingo, where we were ushered into a mini-bus.
The mini-bus left the train station with just six passengers and I was absolutely shocked because I had been certain that we would be stuck there until the next bus arrived and we could stuff at least 18 people in. I shouldn't have worried because we drove to a mini-bus terminal of sorts, where we waited for a couple of hours until we had 20 passengers. The trip was uncomfortable, but it only lasted about an hour, and finally we had arrived at Bromo. The hotels are all at the top of the caldera. We were lucky to arrive at about 4:30 pm. Counting time from when we left our house on Friday night, we had been traveling for twenty-two hours. We were dirty and hungry. As we got out of the mini-bus, we were met by another old man who took us around to the different homestays, a cheaper option than hotels and, as it turned out, our only option since all the hotels were booked for the weekend.
In Indonesia, there is always someone who appears to help you when you are looking for a place to stay. The first time I went to Pulau Seribu, I loved it. Just as I was starting to stress out about where we would sleep, a man appeared and took us to a room. But this practice definitely has an annoying side and as I learn how to speak the language and how to find information on my own, I am starting to get irritated by it. The problem is that once a man attaches himself to you, no one else in the town will help. If you try to talk to someone else, the man will appear and tell that person that you are his.
In this case, our man showed us a very expensive room first. There is no question that it was a nice room. It was clean, the bed was comfortable, there was a western-style toilet, and there was hot water, which is almost unheard of. But it was $35, which is bordering on highway robbery. But after that room, when we told him it was too expensive, he took us to an ever-worsening array of shitholes. Sure, they only cost $10, but I'd have to spend at least another $25 on products to de-lice myself after sleeping in them. We kept asking to see more rooms, hoping to find one for about $20, but he just kept taking us to the $10 rooms and each was worse than the next. It was now dark and we were tired, hungry, dirty, and getting frustrated, with him and with each other. And the bastard knew it. He knew we'd eventually get tired of seeing his crappy rooms and take the expensive one, which we did. Because we had no choice. No one else would help us because he claimed us first. It totally sucked.
But on the plus side, we had a super comfortable room with a hot shower. So, I'm over it.
We'd been able to see the sunset over the caldera (first picture above) before it got dark. It was so beautiful and I was so excited about seeing the sun rise in the morning. Once we got settled into our room, I took a shower. We found a place to have dinner and then we went back to the room and went to bed. I think I was asleep by nine-thirty.
Here's the way the morning works at Bromo: the locals wake up at some completely insane hour to get ready for the tourists. The tourists wake up between 3 and 3:30 am. The jeeps are already lining the roads into the national park. We opened our door at about 3:45 and there was man standing outside, ready to sell us hats, scarves, and gloves, which made us laugh hysterically. I mean, he was outside our door, lying in wait. The early bird gets the tourist, I guess.
Too bad for him that we knew ahead of time that Bromo was cold at night. Yeah, I know I live practically on the equator, so I don't get it either. But cold it was. On our morning, I think it was about 50, which is better than 40, the coldest it seems to get. I didn't bring a lot of cold weather clothing with me. But I do have a hooded-sweatshirt and a wind-breaker. I was wearing both, along with a nice heavy cotton scarf I bought in Cambodia. Shoes and socks, of course. It felt like a morning in October at home. Crisps and cool and the slightest bit uncomfortable, but not too bad.
We piled into our jeep and left at 4 am for the one-hour drive straight up to the lookout point, where we waited another hour for the fabled sunrise. It was super foggy, which I thought was normal, because all of the online pictures of the sunrise show the mountaintops peeking through the clouds and fog. And that is what happens on most days. Unfortunately, not our day. On our day, the sun never came up. We finally gave up and headed back to the jeep at six.
Our second stop for the day was down inside the caldera where we could walk across a pretty vast plane of volcanic sand and up the side of Bromo to peek into the crater. Since we only had an hour, my friend took off for the top. I knew I'd need more than an hour to make it and also that I'd be back--because I want to see that freaking sunrise--so I contented myself with wandering about half way up and also exploring the Hindu temple situated at the bottom.
The place is crawling with tourists, which also means it's crawling with vendors. There are lots of men with horses that you can ride to the base of the stairs to climb up Bromo. I could have done the trip in an hour had I paid to go up on horseback. But the horses were the size of a pony I had when I was three years old. And, armed with the knowledge that my next opportunity to shower was twenty-four hours away, I decided that I didn't want to smell like horse all the way back to Jakarta. I think it was a wise choice.
We explored the caldera for our hour, returned to the village, grabbed our backpacks and got into another minibus for the trip down. At Probollingo, we avoided getting ripped off by the guys that wanted to sell us bus tickets at inflated prices and got on a bus that left ten minutes after we arrived. We got to Surabaya with five hours to kill before our train. So, we pretended we were Indonesian for the afternoon and we headed for the mall where we ate fast food and frozen yogurt and wandered around.
Our train back was business class and it left at 5:30 pm. The trip was supposed to take 12 hours, because the business class trains make more stops. It wasn't uncomfortable and it wasn't too hot. There were fans on the ceiling and the windows were open, so at a few points in the night I was actually chilly. I managed to sleep on and off, being woken up at every stop when the vendors come on the train and stick food and drink in your sleeping face. We got to our stop at 8:15 and got home at 8:40 am. For those of you keeping track, that's twenty-three hours from Bromo to home-o.
So, I traveled forty-seven hours--to see a sunrise that wasn't. Another Indonesian travel experience, but I learned my lesson. Next time I go to Bromo, if I only have a weekend, I will spend $100 on a plane ticket so that I'm not dog tired for a week after. Or, I'll spend three or four days there, so the train travel is spaced a little further apart.
