Solo :: Indonesia
Sampling all of Indonesia's public transport in a very short space of time.
Places: Labuan Bajo, Denpasar, Surabaya, Probolinggo, Cemoro Lawang, Gunung Bromo & Solo.
Coolest thing I did: Watched a perfect sunset over the Komodo Islands from the lobby of a half constructed hotel overlooking Lubuanbajo.
Coolest thing I didn´t know: Ramadan really isn't a pain in the arse here like it is in the Middle East. All they do is put curtains up in the windows of the restaurants and everyone eats anyway. Including women in headscarves. Hmmmm.
I've seen quite a few volcanoes this year and the experience I had with marshmallows over molten lava in Guatemala was always going to be hard to top. Still, I'm glad I went two days out of my way in order to climb the crater of Gunung Bromo (from here on in just Bromo because it's too long to type the real way) to watch the sunrise. The town you stay in, Cemoro Lawang is actually sitting right on the outer crater of the original volcano and you can look down over a sea of black sand to see the two remaining peaks, one active with a smoldering crater (Bromo itself) and one dormant (as opposed to doormat, which is what one Indo guide kept telling some Germans it was). It's an amazing visa, especially when the sun is either rising or setting and I got to see it from two vantage points, one at sunset from the outer rim and once at sunrise looking down into the steaming cauldron itself. It is a 4am start, and you have to walk 3km over black sand in the dark but there's enough other people doing it so you can pretty easily find your way by following the light of the other torches.
After 253 steps you reach the rim of Bromo itself and in the dark it's hard to make out the deep fissures releasing all the steam on the inside, however once the red dawn light breaks over the valley formed by the outer rim it's almost like looking into Tolkien's idea of hell. I also thought that covered in snow the outside would make a pretty decent blue run with a snowboard. It's very rare you get to see a volcano that looks like those volcanoes you draw when you're a little kid, but this is a wonderful exception.
I admire the Cemoro Lawangers for having the guts to build their village on the very edge of what is a pretty geologically hyperactive bit of real estate. They do cover their faces with bandannas when they're tiling the fields to try and breathe a bit less sulfur when the clouds come over in the afternoon and all the old people look like they're made out of beef jerky, but they seem to get on with their hot headed neighbor OK. I guess if you spend most of the day chain smoking a bit of sulfur isn't going to do much more damage.
The trip from Flores over a third of Indonesia to Bromo wasn't one I expected to make. I didn't really want to fly interior flights in Indo if at all possible but the scale of the place and the 30 day tourist visa has decided otherwise for me. I took a flight on a prop plane from Lubuanbajo back to Denpasar in Bali and then within 10 mins of landing I had another flight booked to Surabaya, Java's second city that same afternoon, for $45AUD. What a country. I ended up getting into Surabaya late enough to warrant a stay there overnight and then to get up early to make the trip to Bromo. On the flight over it was a perfectly clear day and you could see down into the man volcanoes dotting the length of East Java. It was kind of like looking at the moon, if the moon was red and had trees on it.
Surabaya is a shock. It's a real, working city, as big, unequal and polluted as any in Asia. As an added bonus it was also my first hot shower and aircon since I left Kuta so I slept there like a baby. Which is a good thing because it's big enough to ignore tourists altogether. I struck up a conversation with a marine diesel mechanic sitting next to me on the plane when I recognised his ringtone as being Black Holes and Revelations by Muse (as an aside, the young Indos seem to all be deeply into rock, bucking the global trend towards more R&B and Hip Hop) and he was a bit puzzled at my being in Surabaya at all. It has 3 lanes of traffic in each direction in the middle of town and no footpaths or crossings. I learned that you just have to walk out into the road and have faith the swarms of motoscoters will miss you. The Indos don't even look but I admit I have trouble with it. Touch wood I've yet to be run down. Surabaya also has shopping centres that are as much palaces of retail in white marble as anywhere in the world, only the scale is massive. Compared to the ramshackle shanties and food vendors carts that huddle in the mall's shadows the shopping centres themselves are inhumanly large. I had trouble getting inside one on foot, you really aren't supposed to go there unless you have a car. It really is the other Indonesia.
After a regular bus to the wonderfully named but armpit-smelling Probolinggo you have to get onto the public minibus that drives through the mountain villages up to the crater of Bromo. This sounds nice, but all these minibusses have had an extra row of seats added and the average Indo is about 3 feet tall. When you're rammed in for 2 hours with my gangly legs it's more than uncomfortable. Still, I managed to grimace nicely at everyone that got on. It's also a good way to see how these people operate. As most of them don't have cars even the business people use it to get their goods around. My favourite was this cunning old lady who would hang out the window at each village and buy a load of something to sell on in the next village up the mountain. Eggs, bundles of spring onions, a bundle of coriander the size of a prop forward's torso she slowly built up her profit margin the higher we got. Takes your mind off the fact you've lost all feeling to everything below your neck.
After the Bromo climb I was a bit drained for the ride back down but did manage to think nice thoughts back to Probolinggo, where I'd arranged to get a van with some other tourists (a bunch of French business school undergrads on exchange in Singapore who seemed to spend the trip playing some game involving stadium names until they fell asleep) that were going to Yogjakarta. We were setting off at 7pm, meaning we were going to drive all night and I'd his Solo at about 4am. I was lucky to secure business class (ie shotgun) and slept between sudden lurches and breaking waking me up, which was quite frequent. The driver kept eating little pills and overtaking 4 or 5 trucks at a time with suitably wild eyes on him. Lucky we didn't have seatbelts, otherwise I'd have felt really unsafe. Between that and being told Garuda airlines 737s have a habit of exploding I'm having to put any rational fears of transport in Indonesia in the back of my mind for now.
My impression of Solo is it's really a bit of a nothing down. It's got two palaces built by the remaining monarchs in central Java after the Dutch decided to let them remain in place as figureheads, so long as they didn't interrupt the spice trade (in the 1700s at some time). Both look a bit shabby and one of them was closed. There's also markets but, you know, there's markets everywhere in the poor world. One of these days I'm going to write to the Lonely Planet and ask why the hell they are so mad on bloody markets. Still, I'm only here to break up the maddening journey of the last few days before moving onto Yogjakarta tomorrow morning.