beautiful bromo

when we finally arrived at cemoro lawang (on the crater overlooking mt. bromo in java: http://wikitravel.org/en/Mount_Bromo) at around 4 or so in the morning, we booked ourselves into a cheap room and promptly fell asleep. miraculously, i managed to sleep until 10:30. joe had been up for a bit, so we promptly headed out to grab some lunch before trekking to mt. bromo.

the hike was awesome. it started by walking down a long, steep road to the bottom of the huge crater. we then crossed a very sandy, desert area before making our way to the base of mt. bromo. there was a temple there that seemed in stark contrast to the natural beauty. we wound our way up to the bottom of the steep stairs - there were about 240 of them, and dad, you would have been fine on the way up, but not on the way down since they were so steep! we made it to the top and were rewarded with an awesome view into the volcano. it was spewing sulfur gas, which didn't smell so good, but looked amazing, especially as the wind shifted and you could see more of the inside. there were a bunch of junior high school kids that rode their motorbikes all the way from probolingo (about 1.5 hours) that chatted us up. the funniest part was when they asked joe for a picture. we thought they wanted him to take their picture. nope! they wanted a picture with him! it was so cute! we asked them to take one with our camera, but it didn't come out, so we don't have it to show you all. on the way down from bromo, they asked for joe's card. the one boy didn't have email, but he had a friendster account!

after sweating our little hearts out up that big volcano, we realized we needed some additional input on our next day's activities (sunrise viewing and finding our way to malang). joe thought he saw a hotel lobby, so we went it. we realized after we started talking to the group of men on the couch, that we were actually at the ranger station. yup, it took us a few minutes to realize all the men were in uniform! it was a wonderfully serendipitous meeting, as we got to practice our indonesian (read: try out phrases from the phrasebook) and chatted about politics, how many rangers are in our national parks and enjoyed many laughs.

after that, we chowed on dinner and went to bed early, as we planned on the sunrise trip up to another peak in the area, penanjakan, that left our accomodations at 3:45am! we had also arranged for motorbike transport to a town not far from malang that would leave around 10am the next day.