All through human history, mountains have been powerful symbols of majesty and mystery. Tribes have worshipped them as the homes of gods, or even as the gods themselves. Men and women have retreated there to explore their faiths and themselves and often been worshipped as well, so close to divinity are they. With their feet on the ground and their heads up in heaven, it's easy to see how mountains have inspired so many complex myths and legends.
Gunung Batur, the third highest mountain and second highest volcano in Bali, has been pretty godly of late for the Balinese. It rises from the caldera of a supervolcano 13km across, which exploded about 30,000 years ago. A lake fills the south-eastern side of the caldera, and a small fishing town has built up around it. Baby Batur has made Daddy Volcano proud with its activity. In the early 20th century it swallowed up half of the enormous caldera lake with its angry rivers of lava. The next major eruption was in 1963 when it completely consumed an entire village. The survivors now live in a new village on the rim. Although the activity has been relatively minor since then, it's still pretty scary to my way of thinking - 50-foot plumes of fire, earthquakes, landslides and constant steam - I said it was being godly... why, you might ask, do people still live so close? That's easy. Because, we're human, because we're stubborn, and because it's really, really, beautiful.
We're woken up at 1am by Made, the Marvellous Manager, with coffee and sliced tomatoes for our sunburn - which I would just like to say is a totally unfair state of affairs because I barely stuck a toe outdoors without lashings of Factor 40 suncream and now I can barely walk. The glow from my legs and torso actually precedes me into a room...
Anyway, we all hop into the cold shower and have a bit of coffee and generally groan about how tough this is going to be, until Guntur arrives to pick us up. It's an hour and a half's drive away through small towns and villages. The road is fairly quiet, but I'm amazed by how many people are up at 2am - there's even a marketplace still open! After about an hour we hit a wall of porridge-thick fog. Guntur doesn't slow down much and it's a pretty perilous drive - hairpin turns and 2 metre visibility. Finally we leave the fog behind us and descend into a valley (at this point in the dark and the fog, I don't realise that I am actually already standing in an active volcano, having just descended the rim of the caldera), where a gaggle of guides is waiting. All the guidebooks had warned me about the Guide Association here, who have an absolute monopoly and terrorise tourists who try to make the climb without paying for the services of a guide, so I am glad to have Guntur, who sorts us out with two guides and some jackets. In our sleepy state we just accept their first extortionate rental offer for the jackets and I'm pretty certain the dark hides some large grins on the faces of the guides, although their own backs are now freezing.
We set off along a lazy slope. We're at a few hundred metres above sea level already, but still have almost a kilometre to climb to reach the 1717m summit. The lazy slope soon becomes not so lazy and then rapidly turns quite energetic on us, and we find ourselves scrambling up rocks and over volcanic scree. I manage fairly long stretches on the lower sections but the higher we go the more often Cait and I find ourselves pleading for breaks. Leigh, Liam and Robyn leave us close to the top and stride on ahead while one patient guide gives the pair of us a hand over slippery rubble. The path by now is zigzagging crazily across the mountain face.
An hour and forty-five minutes after waving goodbye to Guntur, we arrive at the summit, breathless and proud! Below us, the lights of Toya Bungkah sparkle around the edge of the black mass that is Danau Batur, the lake, across which we can faintly make out the darker patches of Gunung Agung (the highest Balinese peak) and other mountains.
It is difficult to believe how high up we are! A man who hiked up with us now produces Cokes from his backpack - he makes this climb twice a day with a full bag - even more than the guides, who have to wait their turn on a rota system and usually only ascend two or three times a week. We're half way through our bottles when he comes to ask us to pay Rp25,000 per bottle - more than six times the most expensive Cokes we've bought in Bali! It's only £1.25 for a Coke at the top of a mountain, but we still grumble quite a bit... At least we've learnt our lesson about asking prices before consumption... I try to take a photo of us, but the camera has to balance on a low bench so we all lean down to fit in.
We sit and we wait and we pat ourselves on the backs as dawn slowly creeps up, casting its pale light over the caldera and our narrow route up.
As the sun pulls its sleepy red self over the bulk of Mount Agung, the gathered climbers - and I use that term for myself with no small pride and a large shot of exaggeration - fall silent at the sight.
It is a serene and majestic moment.
Interrupted, unfortunately, by the cold ache of my knees.
Behind us the guides drink strong Balinese coffee under a shack decorated with prayer flags that snap in the wind.
One of our guides offers to take a photo of us - the sheer joy of having made it up so early in the morning clear on our faces!
Behind our sunrise viewing spot is the volcano's largest and deepest crater. To get to the edge we have to negotiate holes in the ground, holes that are damp around the edge, holes that steam. Robyn and Cait warm their hands over one.
It all feels so exciting! Cross-looking monkeys range around the lip of the crater looking for unwary humans carrying food. Our guide Nyoman is not unwary but quite nervous and is suitably impressed by my monkey-bite scar! He tells me of a ceremony carried out by locals two days ago to appease the gods and prevent another eruption. It's rather like a melodramatic, grainy, 1930s flick, except instead of scary tribespeople in makeup there's a few hundred Balinese people in t-shirts and hiking shoes, and instead of a screaming heroine in a flimsy, billowing, white dress, there's a succession of animals thrown into a pit of fire. A buffalo, an ox, a pig, a deer and a duck are all flung off the clifftop as sacrifice for the angry and gluttonous gods.
At least the poor virgins are spared these days.
We move on to another, more recent crater, the black sandy earth punctuated by steaming holes. Below us, flooding out into the flat floor, there's a barren lava-flooded plain, a single green hill rising from the centre. Four brightly coloured trucks are visible, mining the lava field for rocks to be fashioned into temple statues and roads.
It's 7am and time to go, so we slip-slide our way down a steep path littered with the basalt debris of eruptions.
At the base of the track we sit for a moment to empty our shoes and socks of black dust and then move onwards, past a shrine piled high with pleas for good luck, left by previous climbers, the fluttering flags of the mountain temple just visible over a hill. A Cat digger is excavating a road out of the mountain face which will lead to the temple half way up, and I can't help but think "lucky sods" of those who will make this journey in a year's time. Not that I envy them the halved sense of achievement that will come with the halved climb. My back and knees are sore and I'm silent with my guide as I scramble downwards, several places behind my friends because every step I take presents me with another unmissably gorgeous photo opportunity. When Base Camp hoves into view, I'm exhausted, but it's exhaustion with an extra-large side portion of happy pride.
I've climbed a volcano.
I've perched on the roof of Bali.
So... who's up for Everest next year?
We're woken up at 1am by Made, the Marvellous Manager, with coffee and sliced tomatoes for our sunburn - which I would just like to say is a totally unfair state of affairs because I barely stuck a toe outdoors without lashings of Factor 40 suncream and now I can barely walk. The glow from my legs and torso actually precedes me into a room...
Anyway, we all hop into the cold shower and have a bit of coffee and generally groan about how tough this is going to be, until Guntur arrives to pick us up. It's an hour and a half's drive away through small towns and villages. The road is fairly quiet, but I'm amazed by how many people are up at 2am - there's even a marketplace still open! After about an hour we hit a wall of porridge-thick fog. Guntur doesn't slow down much and it's a pretty perilous drive - hairpin turns and 2 metre visibility. Finally we leave the fog behind us and descend into a valley (at this point in the dark and the fog, I don't realise that I am actually already standing in an active volcano, having just descended the rim of the caldera), where a gaggle of guides is waiting. All the guidebooks had warned me about the Guide Association here, who have an absolute monopoly and terrorise tourists who try to make the climb without paying for the services of a guide, so I am glad to have Guntur, who sorts us out with two guides and some jackets. In our sleepy state we just accept their first extortionate rental offer for the jackets and I'm pretty certain the dark hides some large grins on the faces of the guides, although their own backs are now freezing.
We set off along a lazy slope. We're at a few hundred metres above sea level already, but still have almost a kilometre to climb to reach the 1717m summit. The lazy slope soon becomes not so lazy and then rapidly turns quite energetic on us, and we find ourselves scrambling up rocks and over volcanic scree. I manage fairly long stretches on the lower sections but the higher we go the more often Cait and I find ourselves pleading for breaks. Leigh, Liam and Robyn leave us close to the top and stride on ahead while one patient guide gives the pair of us a hand over slippery rubble. The path by now is zigzagging crazily across the mountain face.
An hour and forty-five minutes after waving goodbye to Guntur, we arrive at the summit, breathless and proud! Below us, the lights of Toya Bungkah sparkle around the edge of the black mass that is Danau Batur, the lake, across which we can faintly make out the darker patches of Gunung Agung (the highest Balinese peak) and other mountains.
It is difficult to believe how high up we are! A man who hiked up with us now produces Cokes from his backpack - he makes this climb twice a day with a full bag - even more than the guides, who have to wait their turn on a rota system and usually only ascend two or three times a week. We're half way through our bottles when he comes to ask us to pay Rp25,000 per bottle - more than six times the most expensive Cokes we've bought in Bali! It's only £1.25 for a Coke at the top of a mountain, but we still grumble quite a bit... At least we've learnt our lesson about asking prices before consumption... I try to take a photo of us, but the camera has to balance on a low bench so we all lean down to fit in.
We sit and we wait and we pat ourselves on the backs as dawn slowly creeps up, casting its pale light over the caldera and our narrow route up.
As the sun pulls its sleepy red self over the bulk of Mount Agung, the gathered climbers - and I use that term for myself with no small pride and a large shot of exaggeration - fall silent at the sight.
It is a serene and majestic moment.
Interrupted, unfortunately, by the cold ache of my knees.Behind us the guides drink strong Balinese coffee under a shack decorated with prayer flags that snap in the wind.
One of our guides offers to take a photo of us - the sheer joy of having made it up so early in the morning clear on our faces!
Behind our sunrise viewing spot is the volcano's largest and deepest crater. To get to the edge we have to negotiate holes in the ground, holes that are damp around the edge, holes that steam. Robyn and Cait warm their hands over one.
It all feels so exciting! Cross-looking monkeys range around the lip of the crater looking for unwary humans carrying food. Our guide Nyoman is not unwary but quite nervous and is suitably impressed by my monkey-bite scar! He tells me of a ceremony carried out by locals two days ago to appease the gods and prevent another eruption. It's rather like a melodramatic, grainy, 1930s flick, except instead of scary tribespeople in makeup there's a few hundred Balinese people in t-shirts and hiking shoes, and instead of a screaming heroine in a flimsy, billowing, white dress, there's a succession of animals thrown into a pit of fire. A buffalo, an ox, a pig, a deer and a duck are all flung off the clifftop as sacrifice for the angry and gluttonous gods.
At least the poor virgins are spared these days.
We move on to another, more recent crater, the black sandy earth punctuated by steaming holes. Below us, flooding out into the flat floor, there's a barren lava-flooded plain, a single green hill rising from the centre. Four brightly coloured trucks are visible, mining the lava field for rocks to be fashioned into temple statues and roads.
It's 7am and time to go, so we slip-slide our way down a steep path littered with the basalt debris of eruptions.
At the base of the track we sit for a moment to empty our shoes and socks of black dust and then move onwards, past a shrine piled high with pleas for good luck, left by previous climbers, the fluttering flags of the mountain temple just visible over a hill. A Cat digger is excavating a road out of the mountain face which will lead to the temple half way up, and I can't help but think "lucky sods" of those who will make this journey in a year's time. Not that I envy them the halved sense of achievement that will come with the halved climb. My back and knees are sore and I'm silent with my guide as I scramble downwards, several places behind my friends because every step I take presents me with another unmissably gorgeous photo opportunity. When Base Camp hoves into view, I'm exhausted, but it's exhaustion with an extra-large side portion of happy pride.
I've climbed a volcano.
I've perched on the roof of Bali.
So... who's up for Everest next year?
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