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Phew, it seems like we haven't had chance to stop and breathe the past week or so and it's not been much better the last few days. We're exhausted!
After the last time I blogged we didn't get a lie in as someone was shouting 'nasi nasi nasi' (rice) from around 6.30am onwards. We didn't fancy getting up for the 6.15am train to Probolinggo so we went for the 12.30 one. If I'd have known we wouldn't sleep in I would have gotten up! It was only supposed to take 5 hours but took 7, messing up our plans. We arrived at around 9pm and tried to have a look around but it was like a ghost town and we needed to arrange our trip to the still active volcano Mount Bromo for the following morning. Our only choice was to go with the mate of a guy who worked at the hotel. I wasn't happy whatsoever as he seemed a bit dodgy and I think we overpaid but we had no choice-this was a must before we came away. I wasn't very happy that he was picking us up at 2.30am and getting up at 2 was awful after only a couple of hours sleep. We weren't too excited about sun rise after a poor show at Angkor Wat. When our driver dropped us off 3km from the viewpoint to watch sunset I had a bad feeling about the trip! We started walking in the pitch black under the stars. Luckily Ben had brought the torch but it wasn't long before men on horses were offering to lead us up. It was a lot nicer being able to look down at the view of twinkling lights in the town and up at the stars without breaking into a sweat and was a very relaxing way to do it. We were soon at the bottom a lot of steps where the horses had to leave us. We arrived at the top to get a cup of tea and watch the sun rise. It was beautiful. Even more impressive was the volcano crater that had been looming in the darkness. It was more impressive than I could have imagined. We took lots of photos before my camera died:( I hadn't charged it since before the Komodo trip and the rooms we've been in believe it or not have only had 1 plug socket which the fan for the room has been in-some rooms the fan was wired directly in so you couldn't charge anything! We trekked back down to our driver thinking it was all over but he asked us if we wanted to go over to the crater-obviously! The guy we booked with said we wouldn't have time for that unless we paid another £15/each to get a jeep over. What a joker. You could get a motorbike over the 'sea of sand' in the crater but we decided to walk. The black volcanic ash/sand was rippled from the lava of the last eruption a few months before. It looked gorgeous, like an un touched desert as no one else was walking! Soon we found big riverbeds that the lava had made which were stunning. I may or may have not (depending if it's allowed, I don't see why not if it's still active) taken a small piece of lava rock. It took us over an hour to reach the bottom of the crater where you could get another horse up to the top but we carried on walking. It was hard work all this walking we were doing, you would sink into the sand at times and walking up sand hills is exhausting. It was pretty steep. Then there were 249 steps up to the crater, which was only slightly smoking that day. Someone needed to give the steps a good sweep as you couldn't see them due to the amount of sand covering them! The crater was like a massive well with puffs of smoke coming out now and again. It was quite a thin ridge with a lot of people up there and there was nothing to hold onto apart from the sand so I was pretty much petrified! I didn't want to stay up long! Back down we went, across the sea of sand of back up a steep hill to our car. It wasn't even 9 o'clock and we'd done so much! I would have loved to have gone back to bed, exhausted with my tired legs but we had a train to catch.
40 minutes of a quick wash free of the stupid amount of volcanic ash which was all over me (all in my mouth too and you could feel it on your teeth) breakfast and we were on our way again.
Our train was packed and a couple of women wouldn't move up and let us sit down on the seats. The ticket man had to come over and tell them to move, how rude!!! Then they were huffing and puffing for a couple of hours until we managed to get different seats with more room. The trains are a different ball game. Constant shouts of food and drink from so many people wandering up and down the train plus people selling things from cooking magazines to baseball caps and stickers. Then there are the beggars and whole bands, all playing musical instruments that stand by you busking. It is mental. The train took 10 hours and it was brutal. We found a hotel by 11pm and crashed out for the night.
On our next day we were keen to get out and look around on our only full day. We really wanted to do the famous temple of Borobudar but getting up at 7am for a tour lasting 8 hours just wouldn't have done us any good. We went shopping and then a guy on a pedal bike thing that's behind a carriage you can sit in persuaded us to let him take us to the water palace, kind of like royal baths. He was being really nice giving lots of information and said the palace was open until 6pm but to beware of the gangs of locals hanging around. So the next thing we knew he drove us over to said gang of locals hanging around outside the closed water palace. Joker. We asked him why he'd brought us there knowing it was closed and he said we could look in from a side street that one of these guys would show us. There was about 10 of these guys and they weren't small. No way was I going down some little side streets with them, I sensed a possible mugging and we were away from the tourist track. We set off to walk back and the driver couldn't look us in the eye, I hope that 70p we paid him was worth it. I'm sure one day someone he tricks won't pay him or lose their temper. Oh well, it could have been worse. We did a little shopping instead.
That night we had our first beer in 6 days and watched the rats go by. Seriously.
We were up before 5am for our flight. I was glad to leave Indonesia. It's certainly given me some great memories but it reminded me of Cambodia and Vietnam with the type of people we met that weren't very nice and it's clearly a very volatile country. Just before we went on our trip to Komodo there was a suicide bomber in a Catholic church in Java in a city we passed through on the train. It didn't feel that safe in places and from the boats they use compared to the size of the waves, it's all about getting money and not thinking of the consequences.
We're having a great time in Singapore but I'll save that blog for now. You'd think we were drinking champagne and eating lobster every day for the amount of money we've been spending!
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