Last year, I went out and toured the Lapindo mudflow in Sidoarjo, East Java. However, I only ever ended up writing this one blog post about it, which was pretty slack. I knew I had started writing a proper feature story, but in all the chaos of being on the road and then going home to Oz and moving to the US, I forgot to finish it and get it published. I was looking for something else on my computer today, and I found the rough draft. So it’s crazy out of date (written in May 2010), but still interesting I think… so here it is, on the blog. I figured it was better to post it here than to not have it published at all… It’s pretty rough sorry and not exactly complete. (PS. I have a slideshow of pics from the Sidoarjo site here).
Read the story…
The food at this little warung right outside my hotel in Surabaya was so good, I would feel guilty if I didn’t write about it. Depot Family Masakan Cina, on Jl Ganteng Besar, just outside the Pavilojoen Hotel (which is an excellent budget option in the city) is simple delicious.
I went there on multiple nights and tried the Japanese tofu in Schezuan sauce, the cumi (squid), also in Schezuan sauce and the baby buncis (beans) in the picture above, served with little morsels of beef. The dishes hovered around Rp 15,000-22,000 in price, but were worth every rupiah. Served piping hot straight out of the wok, the beans market fresh and the seafood from Surabaya’s extensive fish market, it was easy to eat a lot more here than one intended to. The staff were all very friendly as well and the little stand was busy with locals from the moment it opened for the night until late.
This is Ibu Herwati. I interviewed her when I went out to the site of the Sidoarjo mudflow disaster (which I will write more about later…). Ibu Herwati lost her house to the mud, is yet to receive full compensation and now works selling DVDs to disaster tourists showing the mud slowly engulfing the villages in the area where she has lived her whole life.
We talked for quite a while about a number of topics to do with the disaster, which I will write about later. I asked if I could take a photo of her and she agreed, but looked a little reluctant.
“Don’t be embarrassed!” I joked with her.
“But I am embarrassed!!” she exclaimed. “Look, my skin is so black from working out here in the sun.”
In Indonesia, and many other Asian countries, the beauty ideals favor fair skin. Whitening creams are sold by the bucketful and wealthier women often walk under umbrellas to avoid getting dark.
“Your skin is nice. You know, in Australia, many women try and make their skin brown by sitting out in the sun all day,” I told her.
“Really?”
She seemed quite shocked.
“I wish my skin went brown in the sun but it only goes red! Like a tomato,” I added.
“But it is so nice and white,” she protested.
“People always want the things that they don’t have,” I said, unable to muster up much else in my Indonesian.
“We should just be happy with life and what God provides,” she replied earnestly.
My eyes were drawn out to the stinking sea of mud that had covered people’s homes and both my Indonesian and English had run out on hearing this statement that I simultaneously agreed and disagreed with, so I mumbled a yes, pulled the camera up to my face and said “1, 2, 3…”
Monday was my 25th birthday, and since I’m on the road sendirian (alone), I decided I would have to do something pretty special to celebrate a quarter century of existence. To Bromo Tengger Semeru National Park we go!
So from Surabaya, I headed to Probolinggo on Sunday, copped heaps of abuse, lies and rudeness from many of the people in the town there (the train station when I was leaving and the warung next to it were the only place I was treated well, honestly… touts trying to sell exorbitant Bromo tours are everywhere and the general consensus is that white people are walking ATM machines. I got called a slut by one man for saying I didn’t want a Bromo tour… that’s just one example). Then we waited several hours for the minibus to depart for Cemorolawang while our driver tried to extort ridiculous sums of money out of us, with every bus driver being in on the racket, leaving us with little option… then after a dark ride up a wild road into the hills, we (all of us on the bus had become fast friends, united in frustration) finally arrived at our hostel, Cafe Lava Hostel, which was thankfully very friendly and organised and arranged a reasonably priced trip for us the next morning.
It was really cold up in the town, because of the high elevation, so there were thick blankets on the beds. It was fun being cold and sleeping all rugged up… it’s been a long time since I’ve done that!
We weren’t going to sleep at the hostel for long though. Up at 3.30am, we boarded into a jeep and took an insane ride up what could barely be considered a road in the pitch darkness, chasing a spectacular sunrise over the volcanic plain (it’s actually a caldera from an ancient and larger volcano, from which four new volcanoes sprouted) and mountains from the viewpoint on Mt Penanjakan.
We didn’t quite get the rainbow coloured miracle sunrises seen by several of my friends on their Bromo visits due to rainy foggy weather, but nevertheless, we were thankful that at least it was clear enough to see the landscape for 15 minutes or so, before thick fog returned. We couldn’t see Mt Semeru though, the highest peak. Boo, cloud cover! It was still rather spectacular though.
We piled back into the jeep, after first having some difficulty recognising it in the sea of jeeps that were there, and started to head towards Bromo itself (the mountain with the smoking crater in the above), stopping for a few photo ops along the way (like the first pic on the post). During daylight, it became clear just how precarious the road was… there were several parts that had almost vanished in landslides, and at one point a broken barrier seemed to indicate a jeep had gone over the mountain edge. Eeep!
Once we were close to Bromo (second picture from top), we trekked across the ‘sand sea’ of black volcanic grains and scrambled up the rocky hill, which was dusted with yellow specks of sulfur. For the final stretch up to the crater, there was a huge concrete staircase. Once up the top, you could look down into the lava and get a huge stinky whiff of the sulfurous clouds belching from within the active volcano.
The landscape was amazing… it almost looked like we had gone on a trip to the moon sometimes.
Is it a moon horse? No, it’s just for tourists who were too old/young/lazy to scramble up to the beginning of the crater staircase. It was quite steep, but only took about 40 mins to climb to the very top.
It was definitely quite a way to remember my 25th birthday. I’d really recommend visiting the national park… just be careful in Probolinggo.
