After long waiting for updates (6 month of postponement again, Yolanda) I'll go through my 3rd and final day of trip, which is the main trip, which is to Bromo.
Yes, Bromo is the star of the trip however sad to say it was not as enjoyable and satisfying as Mount Ijen, the one that I went to the previous day. Maybe mainly because we feel that the path to Bromo were made easy because of the amount of tourist that went there; thus that "sense of achievement" of climbing is lost. Not to mention the sickening crowd of the whole area.
Just to make it short, as usual we start the trip around 4 at dawn, and we rode the Jeep to the first area to see the sunrise. We were brought to a hill called Love Hill, which were quite recommended to see the sunrise on. There's a little climb here, not a climb actually, more of passing about 50-70 stairs and that's it. After that anticlimax moment, we just took space for waiting and we wait around 1 hour until the sun came.
It's not the best photo, I told you, where most of them were taken with a mind to avoid people in the picture as best as we can.
The twilight were pretty awesome even though it's quite foggy that day. After a while the Bromo can be seen clearly once the fog cleared a bit and the day is getting brighter.
The down-climbing were a lot of homework, passing through the crowd like this..
However we managed to snap picture together on the other side of the hill before we climb down.
Satisfied and done with the Sunrise and Love Hill, we went straight to the next main attraction which is visiting the active volcano of Bromo. Its around 30 minutes by the same jeep, which brought us to nearest spot of Bromo's bottom parking area.
From there it's another 30 minutes until 1 hour of walk to the infamous "Stairway to Hell".
Even though its was not that hilly, what makes the walk difficult is that the ground were mostly sand; thus make it harder to walk, not to mention the sand dust always catch our eyes, and the more we go near the feet of the volcano, the more rocky it is.
Soo, locals gave us solution!! Why not use horse to go to the bottom of the stairs??
So here my and my friends, taking horse..
Moreover, save time! 15 minutes only for maybe an hour trip.
And once we reached the stairway, we just patiently queue..
Managed to took several good photos too while queuing.
Once we reached the top, we saw the hole immediately. The volcanic hole were amazing and both quite scary. Not only emits sulphuric smoke yet the sound of whatever inside is very loud.
After we're satisfied taking photos and awe-ing the volcano, we went down asap since there's still a lot of people queuing for the view. We use the horse again to go down the rocky hill and straight to the jeep parking area, which took us to the other two additional spots, which is Teletubbies Hill and Whispering Sand area.
Teletubbies Hill were actually quite ordinary. It was named that way as it consists of several sized hill that formed in a way that resembles the hill on Teletubbies movie. It was not that obvious but recognizable. We took several group photo as well since there's space to it.
As the day is getting brighter, hotter, and sandier, we just take off to the final location which is Whispering Sand area.
We didn't find any extraordinary thing on this area that day, where we think it was just a big flat plain sand area. However this area were famous since the release of Indonesian movie called "Pasir Berbisik" "Whispering Sands" (literally) which tells story about refugees making their ways across sand dunes, and there's this moment where the protagonist have a habit to "hear the sound of sands" in this ares. And its is true since the locals say that during calmer days, you can hear the sound of the sand's friction that resembles 'whispers', which explain its name. Unlucky for us that it was quite windy that day we can't hear a thing..
Since this is our final spot and maybe marked as the end of our trip in Bromo, me and my other 2 friends took one last photo before we went back to our hotel and get cleaned.
Outside of how pain-in-the-ass hard cleaning all the sands from our clothes and shoes, this is just a perfect trip to stay away from the busy days of Jakarta even though it was only for several days. It is our reminder to keep exploring nature in some ways, as there are a lot more to be seen outside, aside from what we're doing on daily basis in Jakarta.
That's all guys for the consecutive posts about Bromo (which took me half of a year to finish it off, ffs) and see you on my next post!
