Indonesian Experience III - Encounter the smoldering sulfur and beautiful landscape of Mount Bromo (English/German)

English Version

Hi Everyone,

as all of us are currently very restricted in our travels because of the pandemic or in our case also because of our new family member, my wife and I decided to write up one of our last big trips to Indonesia. So all of you can at least experience some of the beauty of our world at home while we enjoy the memories doing this. 😀

As we spent quite a bit of time in Indonesia for our trip, we will create a series of about 8 different posts over time each with a different focus depending on your interest.

This is post 3 of this series. We recommend starting with Post 1- Bukit Lawang and Post 2 - Yogyakarta.

Feel free to "Follow" us if you like this post and want to read about our later adventures in the following posts.

Since we are at the Pacific Ring of Fire, one of the geologically most active regions in the world, we wanted to climb at least one active volcano. We decided to travel to Mount Bromo, located at the Bromo-Tengger-Semeru national park. Mount Bromo ist one of the most active volacanoes on Java. The last eruption was in 2016 (as of October 2018).

We traveled to Surabaya and organized a driver, who drove us to Cemoro Lawang in the morning and back again to Surabaya the next day.

After arriving in Cemoro Lawang, we first had lunch at the Café Lava Hostel. After this short rest, we started our track to the crater rim of Mount Bromo on our own without any guides.

At the end of the village street is a fully developed path, leading down to the Sea of Sand. In front of us was a giant black desert of ash and sand. Thats probably the same view as on the moon.

Fortunately, the direction is clear - always towards the seething volcano. There are no signs or a designated route your would be obliged to take. Apart from a couple of motorbikes, we didn't run into anyone. It's nice to enjoy the silence. We pass a monastery, climb over volcanic rock and through a river bed on our way and sooner then we thought, stand at the foot of a long steep staircase that leads to the crater rim.

Once at the top we were speechless at first. Wow. What a panorama. The rim of the crater is quite narrow and the crater drops almost vertically. It simmers in the depths and it smells of sulfur. We are actually standing on one of the most active volcanoes in Java. And that without many other tourists.

After countless photos, we make our way back through the Sea of ​​Sand. We wanted to see the entire panorama from a viewing platform the next morning.

We have read that the best place to watch the sunrise and view the vulcanic panorama is from King Kong Hill. This spot came also highly recommended from our driver.

We went to bed extra early so that we didn't have to start the new day at 3 o'clock extremly tired and without energy. But in the end, we barely closed our eyes that night, as the extremely loud rattling motorbikes and huge jeeps of the standard tour operators kept driving past our accommodation all the time, so sleep was impossible. In order to wake up at leats enough to start walking, we took a very brief shower under our ice-cold water - yes, there was unfortunately no warm water in our rather run-down accommodation ... but we were definitely awake after this

Okay, so at 3 o'clock in the night we made our way to King Kong Hill with some provisions and a flashlight. Fortunately there is only one way up to the viewpoints or we would have gotten lost in the darkness. After about an hour we were at the Seruni Viewpoint, where many jeeps of the tour operators were already parked. It was quite crowded here. Many villagers sell snacks and drinks or offer onward transport with a donkey from this point on. We passed them all and continued our track up to the next viewpoint.

It was really pitch black darkness, the ascent was sometimes very steep and in some sections we even had to climb because of track break aways. After about another half hour we arrived at a relatively quiet place and were now waiting in the freezing cold for the sun to finally rise. That finally happened around 5:30 a.m. Unfortunately it was very cloudy that day and the volcanic peaks were covered in mist. But as with Borobodur, images with fog also have something very magical about them.

After sunrise we stayed up there for a while and enjoyed the view while all the jeeps drove the tourists to the Bromo crater rim. You could actually see the lines of jeeps driving across the sea of sand from our viewpoint

Doing this tour on our own was spot on, as we had all the time in the world and didn't get lost in the tourist crowds.

After a couple of hours we climbed and tracked all the way back to Cemoro Lawang. Now we first saw where we had climbed at night, always with one foot on the precipice. 🙈

We were back at our accommodation around 10 a.m., checked out quickly and let our driver drive us back to Surabaya for three hours.

Thanks for reading and don´t forget to follow us if you want to keep up to date with our write-up.

In the next post of the series we will tell you, how the story continues on the island of Bali. Stay tuned 👍