Climbing Mount Ijen and Bromo (part 3) - The Road to Bromo

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??

It was quite expensive actually; unfortunately I kinda forgot how much that was but I think it's around IDR 50k-150k round trip depends on wheres your checkpoint when picking the horse). We're quite hesitant at first however since there's quite a lot of horse-user making crazy sand dust with their horse, rather be a victim of the sand-dust itself; we decide why bother walking and inhale all of the dust and just use horse instead, for health reasons..

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.

All in all, it was such a mind blowing trip!!

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!

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!