Climbing Mount Ijen and Bromo (part 2) - Ijen

Sorry for a little bit of postponement from the last post however here I am! As promised, I'll be continuing my post especially for the main part here; which is the climb of Mount Ijen.

On the last post, I left with the trip from Baluran National Park straight to the lodge that I'm sleeping in. It took us around 2 hours (or 1? kinda forgot) to our lodge; which was only 30 minutes away from the start gate of Ijen's climbing point. 

We're staying only for 1 day, as we slept mostly on daylight instead at night, and at midnight we go straight for Ijen climbing. We arrived around 10.00 am at the lodge, bathe and slept, and play around until it reached 01.00 am where we finally took off for the climb.

We were told that it was "only" 3-3.5 kms of trip to the top of the mountain from the starting gate, and we thought that it should be not that hard for us beginners to climb, but HELL I WAS SO WRONG. 

Yes, the distance were not as frightening as it sounds but the degree of the steepness in each hill were so excruciating. It took us several times stopping on the edge of the road just to catch our breath. Just after the climb we just knew that Ijen were quite famous for its 45 degrees hill steepness, which even quite challenging for experienced climbers. Not to mention that the texture of the road were mostly sand, making it twice more slippery than average wet soil.

It was a definitely a heaven-or-hell moment during the climb, but guess what? The view is so worth the pain. By the way it took us 3 hours plus hiking from the bottom to the top of Mount Ijen.

Below were a little glimpse of the sunrise we took before it was fully morning.

The gradation of the sky were so perfect. One thing which was unfortunate was that when we were there it was a little bit cloudy thus we can't see and catch the sunrise very clear; we only managed to take several photos and in no time it was suddenly bright morning. 

Actually, as most of you already know too (maybe), that in Ijen it was not only the mountain that's incredible in sight, however there are 2 more spots: the Blue Fire, which is a crate that fumes eternal blue-colored fire as a reaction from the sulphur combustion reacting with oxygen; and another one is the Ijen Lake, which is its famous acidic lake.

However since it took another 45 minutes to hike down the crate to see the Blue Fire and I kinda can't stand the sulphuric smell, I gave up on that one and decided to just wait on the top of the mountain waiting for the sunrise.

Below were the photo of the blue fire which I got from my friends who went there.

Can't see much since it was very foggy that day, and WORST we can't even see Ijen Lake just behind. Oh well.

From there me and one of my friends took several more photos while we wait for the rest to come back from the blue fire. It was quite freezing at the top (around 7-8 degree-ish celsius feeling) but hell yeah anything for the photo, we will endure!

The crowd within the road to and from Ijen:

Since the sun were fully risen and it was getting hot (and I heard that it was more dangerous to stay for long during the day due to the sulphuric smell), we decided to went back to the hotel (with another 1 hour plus for the hiking-down trip). Our guide took us several more photos for us before we go back to the gate and finish our Ijen round-trip hike.

The main gate at morning, as a closing for our trip:

Now, for overall impression on Ijen: it was VERY VERY SATISFYING, even for a beginner like me. The pain during the climb were totally incomparable with the satisfaction for reaching the top, rewarded with breath-taking scenery and vast skies inviting to be captured. It was even still very memorable until the point when I write this blog post. It was challenging, yet super rewarding.

The only thing that annoyed us very much were the way the sand and the sulfuric smell stuck in our clothes; it took us forever to clean those shitty little pieces. After finish cleaning up, we slept like a dead meat for a while and continued our trip (as in sleeping in the car) to the next lodge where we will stay for our next climb to Mt Bromo.

I think that's all for the Ijen's climb (before it gets too long), and I'll see you again on the final post of my mountain climbing trip which is about Mt Bromo!

Thank you for reading and see you on the next post!

Climbing Mount Ijen and Bromo (part 1) - Baluran National Park

This time I'll be talking about the trip that I had several times ago with my friends, which was a trip of climbing Mount Ijen and Mount Bromo, to be exact. Yes, this was my first mount-climbing experience and hell-yeah it was THAT fulfilling.

Before we proceed, I want to truly apologize for the lack of updates, as I think I didn't have much interesting updates after all from April (besides numerous business trips that I didn't wanna discuss in here, not that interesting anyway) and the most exciting trip that I have during that long period were only this trip; that's worth to be written on the blog. Blame the corporate jobs; or me, for postponing the posts for so long.

Anyway, back to the topic.

This time the trip were quite short and cheap, surprisingly. It took me (us) only 3 days and 2 nights to go to Baluran Park as a side trip, Mount Ijen and Mount Bromo as the main trip. The total cost were roughly IDR 4 million, including round-trip plane from Jakarta-Surabaya, and accommodation: hostel, jeep, climbing guide, driver, everything! FYI we book the tour from the internet; there were so much Bromo-slash-Ijen tour like this available on the net, you can search for it and pick it up based on your needs. Usually it was all in and fuss-free. Please try and happy hunting!

Continue to the post; for the first spot, we went for a night departure from Jakarta, arriving around 12.00 am morning in Surabaya and we took around 6 hours trip via Pantura Line until we arrived at a National Park called Baluran.

Baluran is a quite famous Indonesia's savanna, which park area covers around 25,000 hectares of North Coast of East Java; or so Wikipedia says. And it was very true, as whenever we look on each corner of the park, it was.. savanna. A beautiful one, of course.

Below were the photo I managed to catch just after the dawn, the sky gradation were so pretty.

After the sun were fully rise, it was blazing hot and the sunlight were insanely blinding! The photo didn't do justice on how crazy the sunlight were.

We played around near one landmark around the area and took several photos too.

See? We struggled to keep our eyes open even during one quick shoot! 2 of us brought sunglasses though. Good strategy.

Unfortunately we didn't managed to catch lots of animals there (as what our guide told us it should be). We only catch a herd of deer that moved together from one spot to another, and we couldn't take a good photo of it as it was quite far away from allowable entrance spots.

We only found several wild monkeys playing around, especially on the beach area.

The beach were not quite done yet; it was still under construction by the time we was there. Wish it was done sooner before we reached; too bad that maybe we wouldn't come here again for quite a long time.

Overall, it was a very satisfying view, although as a side note, I feel that this park could have much better maintenance as one of the main attraction around this area. We found that the road to the main spot of the savanna were heavily damaged and not smooth at all, and the rest of the facilities were not as clean as it can be. I hope that they will somewhat improve the condition in the future so that it can attract more both local and international visitors. Finger crossed!

Finish with Baluran, we continue our trip to our hotel to take some rest after a very long and sleepy journey...

The next trip will be directly into the climb of Ijen and Bromo. We do all the climbing around dawn, to catch the sunset around 4-6ish in the morning. It was always quite cloudy at that time we were there, so we couldn't catch a very clear sunset. However it was a beautiful scenery nevertheless. 

As I will definitely post more photos for Ijen/Bromo trip, I need to cut the post here so that It wont get too long and will update the next post very soon, and hopefully no more postponing!

Thank you for reading this one and see you again on the next post!