Things to remember: a volcano is a live mountain
May 24th, 2006 Posted in Destination reports, General
The photo at the left is a 1994 shot of my wife being led down from the summit of Mount Merapi by our patient local guide. Merapi is on the island of Java, in Indonesia, close to Yogyakarta and the amazing sites of Prambanan and Borobudur. If the mountain’s name sounds familiar, it’s because the volcano looked like it was going to blow its top last week and all the villagers were asked to leave.
One of those evacuated villagers is probably our guide. I can’t remember his name, but I do remember he did the whole hike in flip-flops: five hours up starting at 12:30 a.m., four hours down after sunrise. Rocky pumice most of the way. We tipped him the equivalent of a dollar each at the end and the poor man bought snacks for everyone in the group. (In all fairness, a dollar was 25% of what the whole hike cost us, with transportation, so it was a normal tip. But still…)
To say the hike was strenuous would be like saying Borobudur is “kind of interesting.” Our legs ached for days. There was no mistake that this was a live volcano though: at the summit we could look down into the crater and see red glowing lava. We’d be walking along in the dark and feel hot steam coming out of a hole in the ground. The smell of sulpher blew in the breeze. We had picked up enough Bahasa Indonesian though to figure out that the little metal boxes with antennaes the guide was showing us were monitoring devices, in case the thing started to rumble. Would we have time to scurry down?
At the top, we heard a poorly-sung call to prayer emanating out of tinny speakers in a distant town. Then all was quiet as the light increased and a string of volcanoes poked out of the clouds below us. Things are not so quiet now: here’s a picture from a good BBC story with background on the mountain.
I later tried to climb the one on Lombok, but it had erupted the week before we arrived. A few years later we climbed Mount Mayon in the Philippines and it has become active about a dozen times since. If you’re going to do a volcano hike, wear some comfy shoes with good tread. You might have to run.
