Detour at Bromo

The next two days represented the downside of backpacking – getting from place to place can be much easier said than done. Often we looked at a map and said “that’s not that far!”, and two days later, we were still crammed on a bus, crawling our way to our destination. The trip to our next destination consisted of a myriad of nightmare bus rides, long waits, junk food and even a bad ferry ride. In the middle somewhere, we managed to see the sunrise from the peak of Mt. Bromo, one of three volcanoes sprouting from the caldera of a larger volcano.

The buses had been running fairly smoothly since we started using Parama, and it was pretty straightforward from Tulamben to Gimanuk, the jumping off point from Bali to Java. The ferry wasn't too bad… until we were almost docked and they turned on Indonesian music loud to the point of throwing up, and we began to circle in the harbour for the next thirty minutes. Oh well, we thought, we're here… let's go get our bus. But after waiting an hour, at 5:00pm our "guide" announced that the bus "be broken". We were forced to wait if out. Three middle-aged German women were huffing and puffing and demanding better treatment - which is fine in a "package-tour-world" - but not of too much use when dealing with small-time Indonesian businesses. The rest of us just sat patiently, for the most part, and waited.

When 7:00pm rolled around, so did our bus. We figured out what might have gone wrong as soon as Beth chatted up an American couple we later dubbed the "bad luck couple". They had had everything bad happen to them that you could imagine - money stolen, attacked by a rat in there bed, witnessed an accident etc. By the end of their sad story there was even talk of them visiting a clairvoyant in Kuta Beach to find a missing manuscript the guy had been writing. The theme of his book? Why Americans are perceived badly when they travel abroad. On that note, when we told him we were going to Vietnam he replied "Oh, I could never go there". Why, you ask? "Because of what happened during the war" he said with obvious surprise. Maybe it's just as well he lost that manuscript.

During our ride, the German women came collecting! They said that they were on the phone for over two hours, calling travel agencies to complain on our behalf (ummm… we asked you to do this?!) and they needed 2000rp each to cover the cost of the calls. I bit my tongue and paid them, and regret it to this day.

It came as no surprise when our bus broke down in the middle of the highway in the middle of a deserted forest area. We were on a narrow one-lane-each-way highway (the standard in Indonesia) with trucks screaming by at over a hundred kilometers and hour. We knew right away we had to lose the "bad luck couple", and we did just that the next morning when we arrived at Mt. Bromo at 1:00am. They talked about climbing to the summit the next day, so we decided to go that morning.

Bromo was a breeze compared to when Beth and I climbed Mt. Fuji, and predictably, less crowded. The sulfur spewing out of the crater as we waited on the rim for the sun to rise was hard on the eyes and lungs, but the sunrise was worth the wait. As we headed back after getting our share of pictures that would never come close to how a postcard captures the view, we were amazed at seeing in full sunlight the long way we'd come early that morning.

We were exhausted by the time we got back to our base camp, a lodge 3 km from the rim where we'd left our bags, but we were off to Yogyakarta (“Jog-Jakarta”) at 9:00am. We had just a couple of hours to relax and eat.