Merapi Volcano

I knew that today would stretch the limits of what is physically possible… at least for me. I woke up at 3:30 AM yesterday to catch a flight from Jakarta to Yogyakarta, spent the entire day rushing to see as much as I could in the area, caught two hours of sleep in a van on the way to Merapi Volcano, hiked for four hours through the night up the said volcano, then hiked another three hours back down. I didn’t get a real night’s rest until collapsing on my bed at the hotel at 7:00 tonight.

Maybe it was just that I was dog-tired trudging up the mountain in the middle of the night, but Merapi Volcano was a much tougher hike than I thought it would be. For the first few hours I cranked up the music on my iPod and zoned out as I followed the guy ahead of me up the mountain, but as we got higher the trail got narrower and more rugged. I imagined the hike would be something like Timpanogas back home, but Merapi was just as long and about twice as hard. I hiked with two Japanese guys from Yokohama, a couple from Singapore, and an Indonesian guide who looked to be about fifty. Near the top of the mountain the trail turned to lava rock that shifted precariously as we walked on it. As we got closer to the top I smelled a foul odor that got stronger as I kept walking. At first I thought the guys in front of me just smelled bad, but my Indonesian guide pointed to vapor escaping through cracks in the lava rock and said, ‘sulfur’. The entire peak of the mountain was covered with hot sulfur vapor escaping through vents in the rock. It was tempting to warm my hands near one of the cracks venting the stuff, but I thought of the smell and decided against it.

I reached the peak at a little after 5:00 and had just a few minutes before the sun rose above the horizon. The landscape at the top looked like the surface of the moon might look, and the sulfur vapor floated east with a light breeze and obscured the horizon. Merapi has erupted several times in recent history, and the most recent eruption in 1994 killed 60 people. I thought for a minute how it’s a little ridiculous that an active volcano is also an active tourist attraction – in the United States the same mountain would be closed off and forbidden to everyone. With that said, the climb was an adventure and if the thing only erupts once every 15 years or so, then hanging around for just an hour or two at the top really isn’t that risky.

As sliver of sunlight peeked above the horizon the rays cast bright pink and yellow light across the clouds. The sulfur vapor made the view eerie and mysterious and I felt like I was suddenly on a completely different planet. I snapped photos for about an hour; mostly of the horizon in front of me and of the landscape surrounding Merapi below. Before I reached the top I somehow thought that I’d be able to get shots of endless jungles of palm trees and red-tiled roofs poking out through the growth, but from 9000 feet up everything below me just looked flat and green. Either way, the view was incredible and well worth the hike; especially now that I’m through with it and can enjoy my pictures without thinking too much about the climb.

I slept for about an hour during the van ride back to Yogyakarta, but oddly enough I didn’t feel like sleeping when I got back to my hotel. I heard from the Singapore couple about a bird market in downtown Yogyakarta that was a fascinating sight, so I caught a rickshaw and headed down for a look myself.

An Indonesian bird market is about like a giant, chaotic outdoor yard sale… but with animals instead of old junk. Most of the items for sale at the market are roosters, pigeons, and other various birds, but a few things that were particularly exotic caught my attention. Several of the vendors had giant live bats for sale. I became captivated by the bats and stared into the cages of several of them, glaring at their 14-inch-long bodies and wings wrapped tightly around them as they slept hanging from the tops of the cages. I can only imagine what their wingspans must be like. Who buys bats anyway!? I can’t imagine who would need such a creature or what they would do with it, but someone in Yogyakarta must have a pretty good use for live bats. While wandering through the market I also spotted a few live owls for sale, mongooses, ferrets, and a four-foot-long iguana.

I finished the day off with a visit to ‘Griya Shiatsu’, a place in town specializing in shiatsu massage. Massages are so affordable in Asia that it’s hard to justify not getting several of them. When I was in Southeast Asia in 2006 I must have averaged a massage every two or three days. At $5 for an hour-long Thai massage it was hard to go wrong. At Griya Shiatsu 100,000 rupiah (10 US dollars) bought me a two-hour massage including a foot massage. Some parts of the massage were so painful that I instinctively pulled away and had to consciously force myself to stay still, but at other times it was so relaxing that I drifted off to sleep for a few minutes at a time. Afterwards I headed back to my hotel and laid down on the bed for a few minutes rest. I intended to get up, do some writing, and update the blog… but a few minutes quickly turned into the whole night.