"how many on your side?"
"37. you?"
"70."
we are counting 4wd jeeps on the way down from gunung bromo, and the count ends up well past 250. so, not including ojek (motorbike taxis) and assuming tourist capacity of four per jeep (which is, in fact, six) we shared the mystical experience of sunrise over the gunung bromo crater with at least a thousand other folk. and it felt that way too! sunrise is at around 5:15, so we woke up at 3:30 and piled into our jeep with a parents-aged dutch couple (who, based on a combination of factors (e.g., van dyke moustache (him), designer trekking gear, and subtle but intriguingly-placed piercings), probably have a fairly interesting private life) and a rumply french dude. in our caravan of 250, we roared up to the lookout point of mt. pananjakan. "jacketjacketjacket" a running stream of syllables to the left and right, as local tinggal men wrapped in sarongs like blankets hold out armsful of fur-lined jackets for the ill-prepared. a line of men are roasting corn, and the soft pop of kernels on the charcoal brasziers is like punctuation to the thousand conversations swirling around -- it is astonishing that everyone is so talkative at this hour. a group of thirty men are standing in rows just next to the toilets (coincidentally, i think), chanting, facing north.
"does someone have a campfire out there?" i ask, seeing a plume of smoke and a faint orange light in the distance. um, no. that's the volcano. smoldering mt. bromo, spewing sulfurous fumes nonstop, and his taller, sleeker, greener brother, mt. batok, looks on calmly, fumeless. "be back at 6" our driver tells us, and we are, and so join the caravan down to the floor of the crater. its about a 30 minute walk from the jeep park to the top of mt. bromo, but if i were to suddenly lose the will to move or feel like wearing high heels to the wilderness or just need to take the time to make a few business calls on the way, plenty of horses were on offer and, indeed, were offered to me.
after the official tour and breakfast, we hiked back down into the crater for a bit more personal man/nature encounter, without quite so much man/man dilution. it's massive -- on one side, the landscape softens into savannah and grasses, and over by the bases of the edges of the crater, farmers attend to their crops and give us barely a glance. on the other side, covered completely by the lootiapesir sand sea, and some areas with stranger superheated crusts of shiny rock that look solid but that break like sharp peanut brittle. its starkly beautiful, and when the mists start rolling in, the blank sand slate is swallowed by a sea of billowing white.
