An Unforgettable Nightlong Trek to the Crater of a Bubbling Deity : VOLCANO: Farmers Make Offerings to Crater

NGADISARI, Indonesia â€”  My young guide’s boyish thinness hid a remarkable, wiry energy. When he smiled up at me, his teeth were yellowed from filterless cigarettes and sugar cane-chewing.

No more than 16 years old and apparently immune to exhaustion, he walked my sturdy mountain pony the entire seven miles from the mountain village of Ngadisari to Mt. Bromo, one of Java’s still-active volcanoes.

Surrounded by craggy peaks and a vast sea of sand, Bromo has an eerie, end-of-the-world feeling, especially at sunrise. On horseback with a local guide, it’s an all-night trip across a lunar landscape, exhausting and utterly unforgettable.

With no shoes on his feet to cushion them from the cracked earth, the boy commanded my horse to keep to the path with clucks of his tongue and alien-sounding words.

As the inky night surrounded us, I could hear 10 other bleary-eyed adventurers clip-clopping behind us, tourists from at least three other continents. We were all strangers to this road, lost in the stars that hovered like UFOs, just beyond our grasp.

Geographically, most of the province of East Java is flatter than the rest of the country, with long plains of rice fields and lowland deltas. But Mt. Bromo rises from the Tengger Massif, with the highest mountains in Java. It’s an altogether raw, undisturbed region, rich with Indonesia’s melding of ancient religion and superstition.

As we moved deeper into the forest, I began to wonder if my guide knew where we were headed, so blinding was the darkness. What if he became as disoriented in this mountain world as I felt? But he’d assured me he’d made the trip at least 200 times before, so it was merely a question of trust.

I wanted this new experience, leaving behind my dusty, day-to-day regime to climb an ancient crater and look upon the sun at dawn.

But for all my expectations, I never realized we’d be passing through a magic Twilight Zone time warp that I may never see again. No traveler to this part of the globe should overlook a chance at this expedition. It’s a long walk into the very heart of Indonesia.

Climbing higher into the hills, the clouds moved in a slow procession beneath the moon, hanging like a sliver of white melon on a dark canvas. A whisper of damp mist clung to my cheeks and hair. At any time of the year, it’s cold in these mountains, and a wild wind can whip down the slopes with no warning.

The wet chill began to seep into the blankets my guide had wrapped around me back at the village, when he’d seen I’d worn only a sweatshirt for the trek.

A minibus had picked me up in Surabaya, Indonesia’s second-largest city, where the air is hot and heavy, but by the time we’d reached the high village of Ngadisari, the sharp contrast in temperature was all too apparent.

The ideal time of year to visit Bromo at dawn is the dry season, from April through November, when the sky is clearest at sunrise, and you can be guaranteed a colorful sight.

After signing the visitor’s book in the local police station, (a pink shack with rusty metal table and two worn leather armchairs), visitors pay the stable man 5,000 rupiah (about $5 U.S.) for a pony and guide.

Though the journey begins at three in the morning, tiny oil lamps burn in huts along the slanting cobblestoned road, leading travelers out of the village. Ascending into the hills, the steady rhythm of hooves echoing through the trees, all else is darkness. Dense and shadowy, they seemed to change into a haunted wood, long branches twisting and stretching towards the sky like solidified wind.

There is a very real belief in ghosts and various benevolent and malevolent spirits in Java, reflecting the Javanese ability to absorb and practice different beliefs. Nominally Muslim, their religion is a mix of Hinduism and Islam, stirred with their age-old mysticism.

Graveyards are generally thought to be haunted. Magical powers are said to be concentrated in amulets and heirlooms, like the Javanese dagger called the kris. The dukun, the traditional medicine man, is still consulted over modern doctors when sickness strikes.

This is the highest region of East Java, where Mt. Bromo is edged in lush sloping farmland composed of rich volcanic soil where almost anything can grow.

The center for the Tenggerese farmers, they cultivate market vegetables on the slanting hills, eking out an income in centuries-old traditions. No television static cracks the stillness of their nights. No streetlights break their curtain of dreams--only the moon brightens their midnights, lighting the rooftops of their hillside shacks.

Sticking stubbornly to their beliefs, the Tenggerese worship as their ancestors once did on Mount Bromo’s crater. Climbing the volcano each January, a colorful procession of farmers and their families throw offerings into the crater at dawn, begging the bubbling god of the volcano for peace and good crops.

Local legend has it that the great Tengger crater was dug out with just half a coconut shell by an ogre, smitten with love for a beautiful princess. When the king of the land saw that the ogre might fulfill the task of digging he’d set for the hand of his daughter (which had to be completed in a single night), he cruelly ordered his servants to pound rice, as they did each morning.

The cocks began to crow, thinking it was sunrise. The poor ogre, believing he had failed, flung away the coconut, which locals say became Mt. Batok, another nearby volcano. The trench he dug became the Sand Sea, which we were now about to cross. Alas, the poor giant died of exhaustion.

Our ponies halted at the crest of a rise, and the path curved downhill like a serpent. Beneath lay a valley, shrouded in foamy fog. My guide began to move forward, leading me into this acid whiteness, where the clouds of heaven seemed to touch earth. The voices of my companions were lost in the cool night as we separated, the blanket of mist drawing us into the valley’s wet heart.

Bromo is actually a crater within a crater, one of four mountains that have emerged within the Tengger volcano. This flat Sand Sea between the craters is a Martian landscape, and the heavy fog masks all landmarks in the dead of night.

As we crossed this desert, I remembered reading that in this region, they once sacrificed young virgins to the spirits by throwing them into the glowing craters. This void of blind night suddenly seemed eternal. My guide flashed a penlight on and off to trace our path, marked in white on rocks, carefully placed along the ground like tears of dried lava.

Light was breaking dimly in a distant corner of the valley, drawing aside the curtain of mist. The violet veil of dawn lifted, and a new day was beginning. The first rays shot over the primeval landscape, turning spooky night to comforting morning. Just ahead, we could see the puffing craters of Bromo and his brothers--they’d been directly in front of us the whole time.

Surrounded so suddenly by these majestic, red-earthed giants in the dawn light, I felt a very small being indeed. The brochure from the tourist office that had first drawn me to Bromo now seemed very apt. In a delightful use of English, it had read:

“Only at Bromo, 2,383 meters above sea level, can one see how lustrous the aurora of the sun, in mixing colors of white, pale yellow, yellowish red turning red appears from behind the hills in front, to brighten the atmosphere to daylight, does one feel oneself to be like one grain of small green pea amid a vessel of sand.�

I couldn’t have put it better myself. It was as if we’d stumbled through a doorway into “The Land That Time Forgot.� A pterodactyl, winging its way across the valley, was all the scene lacked. But we were alone, for nothing lives here. The only sounds come from the belching volcanoes, lustily vocalizing their powers over the province.

At the base of Mt. Bromo, the acrid smell of sulphur hit us as we dismounted and stretched our legs. A rickety staircase of timber pointed like a crooked finger to the rim of the crater, 246 steps, straight up. We were just in time to greet the sun as it rose over the edge.

One energetic couple in their 60s passed me on the way up. At the top of this ancestral altar, everyone stood in silence. I felt tiny and insignificant, watching the ghosts of the night vanish in a blaze of golden warmth.

I focused my camera on one of the distant giants, and one perfect white cloud spewed out, like a prehistoric smoke ring. Staring deep into Bromo’s crater, we noticed one courageous scoundrel had carved his initials in the white ash rock a hundred feet below near a gurgling pool of lava, tattooing the august sentinel with his ant-like scribblings.

With the sun came the first heat of the day, and I pulled the rough blankets from my shoulders. Ahead of me, people walking at the edge of the crater looked like shadows thrown on a screen, the blinding sun turning them to silhouettes.

Indonesia offers 13,000 islands and some of the most astounding sights and musical sounds in Asia. Mythical dragons still live here on the island of Komodo, butterflies grow bigger than your fist, and Javanese puppetmasters spin stories of centuries gone by. And the sun rises over Mt. Bromo like no other sunrise you’ve seen.

As I stood at its edge, I knew that somewhere the 20th Century was progressing into another era, but it was somewhere else, far away from this mystical wedding between the world that we knew, and a world we’d never seen.