Bromo

I couldn't sleep that night; a nasty chicken soup kept me up all night with foul gas and stomach pains. I decided to pass the night away by going to the top of Bromo. There was a minor pre-dawn pilgrimage to Bromo. I weaved through talkative packs of Indonesians. It was a flat walk through the sea of sand approach to Mt. Bromo. A wooden stairway ran from the base of the volcano. I had no idea what time it was and decided to wait at the top. I must've waited for hours up there... in the cold, dark, smelly rim of Bromo. As I shivered, I could overhear snippets of others' conversations, "that guy (me) is wearing shorts.... and it's really cold, etc..."

And when the sun finally rose, I saw hundreds of noisy Indonesians crowded by the top of the stairway, blasting their techno music, dancing to the blood-streaked sky. With a bit of a shove and tricky footwork, I walked past them and hiked alone for the next 6 hours. 10 feet from the stairway, no Indonesians dared venture! And the trails showed lack of use as my legs were scratched and cut up by overgrown pricklies and grasses. I would stop and admire the lava beds below, the clouds still held in the far valley, the imperial sun slowly rising above the, the sea of gray sand left from ancient eruptions, and the resonating green and red dry tall grass path before me. 

I walked quickly on delicate ash spines of the craters. Bromo turned out to be connected to a whole complex of extinct volcanoes. Over the mountain ridges i could see massive Mt. Semeru. Calmly and inaudibly, it erupted--- huffed and puffed out of the corner of my eye. I looked back at it to get a better look, and it had already stopped puffing. A fickle volcano. One part of the trail was mysteriously charred black. Had some fire raged here recently? A volcanic eruption? Whatever it was, I kept walking in disbelief. The colors were so vivid in the dry mountain craters. Some parts of the trail were so narrow and bordered by such deep drops I fearfully crawled on my hands and knees.