Woke up about 7:45, Vincent came and awoke me. Everyone else was up, and had already had breakfast, when I got up, they made me breakfast, a boiled egg and two jaffles (grilled sandwich, with tomato and onion inside).
I slept pretty good, but the rubber matress is pretty thin, so it was hard to lay on my side, I got sore hip bones now, and my feet were kind of cold. But slept good, considering. It was about 13 degrees last night.
We left about 8:15, the hike went up and up and up and up. Never ending up.
On the way up, we left the rain forest, and entered, well, dry, dusty, arid, windy grasslands. Not that impressive scenery on the hike up. As I was walking, I was thinking about how things that I would have at one time considered spectacular, things that would have given me that "WOW" factor aren't doing it for me anymore. I've seen sooooo much over the last 9 months, it takes a lot to impress me, I guess. In the more recent months, not much has impressed me anymore. I'm definately not excited about things like I was at the start of the trip.
Then I stepped over the crater ledge, and this huge, expansive crater lake opened up before, with a smaller volcano, more recent, to one side of the lake. I did go "WOW"!!! Utterly spectacular. I was in awe. It was an incredible sight.
Our porter arrived at the rim first, then Vincent and me, and we had to wait 45 minutes or so for our guides to arrive.
We ate some mango, and gave the peelings to a few monkeys that were hanging about. Mango tastes soooooo good when it's cut fresh!
After relaxing and snacking, we hiked down to the lake, then to the hot springs, got there about 1:30.
We had lunch, rice, veggies and canned pieces of mackeral, which I avoided. It still had the scales and bones in it!
Lots of locals here, it looks like a homeless village, locals making shelters out of torn tarps or pieces of corrugated metal lying around. And us with our state of the art dome tents. We were the centre of attention.
This is a holy spot for the locals (the mountain, and the hot springs), which is why so many of them come up here.
We then went downstream a short ways to the hot spring pool that no one else was using, and swam and soaped up and shampooed. The water was quite green, and had lots of algae in it. It's very warm, but not too hot.
I had my backpack sitting on the other side of the stream, and a monkey showed up and started hissing and showing his teeth at us. Our guide kept throwing mud and algae and hot water it, and the monkey was getting all riled up about it. I had left my backpack open, after taking out the soap and stuff, and the monkey decided to go check it out. He ran over, grabbed my toothbrush, and took off with it! He sat on a rock for a while, sniffing it and biting it, then our guide threw something at it, and he dropped it in the rocks. I decided to leave it there. I moved my stuff to the other side of the stream then. The monkey disappeared. The water temperature was 38 degrees.
After lounging in the pool, we headed back to the tent, I went fora big crap (mother nature as the toilet), our two guides were napping in their tent, so Vincent did too, I walked back to the lake for a bit.
Porter gets paid 50,000 rupiah/day.
At 6:00, guides made us noodle soup for supper. I went to bed after that, about 6:30 (nothing else to do!)
On the way up, I asked the guide when the last time the volcano erupted. He said in 1997, and he was camped on the beach of the lake, with a German tourist. There were rocks landing all around them. They were both terrified, and just ran and ran and ran, up the crater rim. When they were finally safe, the German guy was crying his eyes out because he was so happy that God had spared his life. The guide said he was absolutely terrified of the experience.
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