Bromo: It’s a volcano not a washing powder

After our adventures at Ijen, where Maja and I had an exciting if scary day visiting the sulphur workers in the bowels of the volcano (see the video), we headed westwards for a place that one young Javanese student of tourism said was the single best destination on the island: Bromo volcano.

Yes, another volcano; but we didn’t mind, we well and truly had the bug by now and this promised to be one the kids could safely visit too.

After a long bus journey (in Java, all bus trips all seem to go on forever regardless of the number of as-the-crow-flies miles involved, largely because they have to circumvent so many bloody volcanoes) we stopped in Probolinggo to switch to a local bemo (minibus) for the last leg up small steep roads to the rim of the Bromo caldera.

It was very hot, Probolinggo was a rather grimy town renowned for its many thieves, and we had to hang around for a couple of hours waiting for enough tourists to turn up before the bemo would leave.

So we kept our luggage close, had the standard nasi goreng (fried rice), mie goreng (fried noodles) and plate-sized prawn crackers at the nearest cafe, and suffered a major tantrum from Ariel who needed the loo badly but wouldn’t go (understandably, as the ‘toilet’ was just a small hole in the floor). At last, after a local lady along with a sizeable cupboard squeezed into the bemo, we could leave.



















Once past a few miles of the ubiquitous rice and maize fields, the Bromo road started to twist up the side of a wooded river valley that for a while morphed into a canyon, briefly revealing an amazing set of waterfalls far below.

Soon, the woods gave way to one of the prettiest agricultural landscapes you could imagine: every hillside, however steep, was covered in geometric fields of huge ‘supervegetables’ that obviously thrived in the volcanic soils. The lines of planting often angled downwards but away from the prevailing slope, I suspect to aid drainage while minimising soil loss, and the effect was stunning.

Finally, with the towering green outer walls of the caldera above us, the bemo somehow scrambled up a final, almost vertical road to leave us at our hotel in the hamlet of Cemoro Lawang. It was getting dark, it was misty, and it was (something we weren’t used to anymore)... cold.

[Note: A caldera is the collapsed magma chamber of a historical - normally huge - volcano that takes the form of a circular basin, often, as at Bromo, with more recent volcanic cones popping up in the centre. Ijen is also a caldera, as is Gunung Ajung in Bali, where incidentally we had an argument with a thuggish guide and didn’t actually climb the cone]











After Maja had haggled skilfully to upgrade our room (from a dark hole down near the hotel’s drain to a bright room with a balcony and view back down the valley) for not much more money, we dug out our fleeces and walked up the last few hundred yards to the caldera’s edge to see what all the fuss was about.

Although drifting cloud and fading light obscured much of the view, we realised we had come to a very special place. Beneath us the caldera wall dropped steeply away to reveal an expansive, largely sandy basin floor – called the 'Sand Sea' – over which loomed the smouldering stump of Bromo and its perfect conical neighbour. In front of the volcanoes stood a small Hindu temple, obviously built to placate the volcanoes, and a few horses trotted back to town, bringing the last of the tourists home before nightfall.


At dawn the next day we set out in a Jeep taxi to the car park near Bromo’s base, which left a short walk up across rutted ash deposits to the steps to the crater’s edge. As we arrived, horsemen and vendors were also turning up, preparing to transport, feed and water the tourists.

Ariel, who never likes being woken up early (just like his dad), was in a big grump and wouldn’t walk, so Maja and I took turns to lug him up to the top, which he hated anyway because of the stench of rotten eggs from the fuming vent down below.











The views from the top were amazing but as the place was heaving with Javanese school groups that kept crowding around us to take pictures and ask where we were from (it happens a lot in Indonesia), I took the boys down and let them play happily in the black gravely deposits lower down the cone (where they still got hassled by the locals on the way down – see if you can spot them in the pic below). Eventually we wandered back to the taxi and headed back across the sand.













Unexpectedly, the trip up the volcano itself was pretty much the least interesting thing we did at Bromo - it's a bit busy and noisy when the crowds arrive at 7am. Most people just arrive, whiz up the small cone, take a snapshot of themselves making the victory sign, and then leave. We loved the area’s lovely calm atmosphere and unique scenery, so we stayed a few days doing other things and could have stayed more.













The following morning, Maja took Aron on a dawn motorbike ride up to a viewing point on the caldera wall to get some photos of the volcanoes from above. She hadn’t realised what a steep track they would be taking, but Aron took to motorbiking like a mini Hell’s Angel (sandwiched between the two adults) and loved it. Maja got some great shots too, thanks to a lucky break with the weather that had been cloudy for weeks.













Later we arranged to hire a couple of horses to take Maja and I across the caldera sands. Our steeds for those few hours were like chalk and cheese: one was a local racehorse with beautiful curving musculature; the other was an angular ol’ nag with bones sticking out at weird angles. But both proved tricky to take anywhere. They were so imprinted with going to the Bromo steps and back to town every day that we had a bit of a fight to just walk where we wanted. I was also a bit freaked out as we headed back and my horse kept breaking into a gallop without warning. Still it was fun. Even Aron got to have a ride – being led by the reins, of course. And he really took to it, demanding another ride around town the next day. He’s becoming quite the adventurer.











Finally, the occasional jockey/owner of the faster horse gave us a thrilling demonstration of how to gallop (sometimes controlling the horse with one hand, a cigarette in the other).











As he tore up the sands, Maja got the urge to have a go and after a few faltering attempts to get the horse moving, managed a pretty good gallop; brave woman that she is. Even I got the courage to get back on and have a try but didn’t manage much more than a canter.

Still we’d had a great day, finished off perfectly by a session with Aron and Ariel rolling down the sand dunes and running around in the small sandstorms that blew through every so often. This is why we brought the boys travelling. Heaven.














[Note: The opening pic is a composite I made of Maja's photo's from the viewing point. To the lower left and smoking is Bromo with its neighbouring dormant cone. Behind is Gunung Penanjakan (2770 metres)]