Indonesia's Alien landscapes

  Recently I have been flaunting this old Printed Tee-Shirt of mine with a Anoman (hanuman In Bahasa indonesia) graphic on the front side and some ramayana story brush up on the rear, and so when people questioned about the Tee i got reminded about the beautiful landscapes of Surabaya,Indonesia. It usually used to be myself looking for places to visit for an upcoming long weekend followed by convincing people to join me for the trip and the organizing the entire thing and so the entire process lasts from one long weekend to the next long weekend (roughly two months), yeap this was life in Singapore. This time all i had to do was suggest the place to my friend, His Girl friend was an Indonesian and so she took care of the planning part. All i had to do was pay her the money and apply for a extra day of leave at the office. I knew the itinerary had volcanoes and waterfalls but i never imagined it in the scale and grandeur it was realtime.

So it was 4 of us flying out on the morning prior to the long weekend on an air asia flight to Surabaya. Fyi i carried my manglik luck along i think, there was an air asia flight which skid off surabaya runway the next week, a nearby volcano became active stopping traffic across the region 6 months later and an airasia flight from surabaya to singapore crashed exactly after an year we came back (i hope its all just random things) but then "some say i am Shani bhagavan's long lost cousin from another dimension" (Bad one, always wanted to make my own stig quote thats all i could come up with - go ahead n suggest ur version in the comments).Anyway as we landed in surabaya we were greeted by some brilliant views of Mt.Sumeru (another active volcano)as we landed. It was past noon, we got into an SUV and started our journey insomnia express to ijen crater which was supposed to be a 7 hr drive, with some dinner, beer & sutta stops it took just 10 hrs, reached our room close to midnight. 

4am the next morning in a zombie state we took our ride to a ranger post for starting a 6km trek to see sunrise on a crater lake - Kawah Ijen crater. The trek started in darkness, as we reached the halfway point we could see light shining upon surrounding mountains as we realized we were in the middle of deep dense tropical vegetations surrounding 3 volcanic mountains. As we slowly inched our way up the views just kept getting better. Also we kept seeing a lot of locals carrying some yellow rocks on custom made bamboo pots balanced on their shoulders. As we enquired we realized they were sulphur miners carry toxic sulphur rocks from the crater to the bottom, each bamboo load apparently weighed close to 85 to 100kilos. The landscape completely changed all of a sudden as we neared the crater, it was all grey ash filled dry lands on one side and completely contrasting green vegetation on the other side. 2600 meters above sea level we saw a beautiful turqoise blue lake like a eye of an huge alien face filled with scars and smoking a cigar out of one corner. it was a foggy morning but we did not mind to wait until sun came up just to get a proper view to digest what exactly we were seeing.As we sat there waiting for the sun to rise above the fog, we saw miners walking past us into the restricted zone picking up 100 kilos of sulphur climbing up 2.5km mountainous rocky terrain and then trek down 4 km to weighing station all for 10$ a trip inhaling sulphur all the while. And for once i was happy about my job and my peanut pay (though only for a couple of days until we came back to singapore). Finally as the sun came up i was pretty sure i was on some other planet. See below What i saw
P.S: the pics below are from a iphone , Please do google to understand

As we climbed down we were able to get a glimpse Bali across the sea at a distance(thanks to the altitude), there was a smile and i knew this was just a teaser of what surabaya was. the curiosity just grew as we drove back to our room crossing atleast 6 or 7 cascades which we missed out in the dark.
Will continue with my experiences of almost sliding inside Active volcano Mt.Bromo in next blog.