Indonesia, part 1

Yesterday we arrived home from Indonesia.  We were gone for 12 days and had a horrible overnight flight from Denpasar to Melbourne.  I had managed one hour of sleep in about 27 hours so I felt like rubbish when we got home, and had to go to bed for five hours.  I'm feeling slightly more alive today so it's time to update this blog and tell you all what we've been up to!

We flew Garuda Indonesia which wasn't too bad.  Their business class seats are reasonably comfortable to sit in but horrible to sleep in.  And the service, although friendly, was a little lax at times.  If Garuda wants to move up the Skytrax world rankings they're going to have to get their butts in gear.  But no matter,  they got us there and back safely and that's the most important thing.

Our first adventure was to the island of Java, to do some volcano hiking.  After flying to Surabaya from Denpasar, our guide picked us up from the airport and drove us to Malang, where we spent the night.  Well, I say night, but actually we had a 1am wake up call as we left Malang at 1.30am in order to make it to Mt Bromo in time to see the sunrise.

Note the lack of actual sunrise pictures. Yeah, not really worth it.

Anyway the erupting Mt Bromo was quite spectular so it was (almost) worth the ridiculously early start to see it. We're both pretty sure it would have been just as good at 10am as it was at 5am.

In the bottom left corner of that picture above, just above the tree, you can see a little camp where the locals have a temple.  When Mt Bromo is NOT erupting, you can go across the caldera floor (presently covered in fog) and climb to the crater itself.

And what you can't see behind the smoke and ash coming out of Bromo is Mt Merapi in the back ground, the very same volcano that erupted in October and killed a lot of people.

Later that morning we left Bromo and spent hours and hours (and hours and hours) driving to Ijen Resort in preparation for climbing Mt Ijen the next day.