East Java Jalan-Jalan

January was a busy month with some hard work book-ended by two pretty awesome trips. Mom and I got to explore the forests of West Borneo at the beginning of the month, and then Tabitha (another Fellow) and I got to round things out with a tour of East Java. We had a few disappointments when Mother Nature just didn't want to play ball, but mostly the trip was a great way to see the inhabitants, flora, and fauna of East Java and get the heck out of Jakarta. 

Tabitha, another native Ohioan, and I started things off here, at Mt. Bromo. Bromo is short and seemingly unimpressive as far as volcanoes go. It only takes 20 minutes or so to climb to the crater's ridge, but it is known throughout Indonesia as playing a major role in the Hindu religion. Legend has it that a childless King and Queen begged the god of the volcano to allow them to bear children. He did, and the couple had 25, but not without a price. The god demanded the youngest boy as a sacrifice. When the queen refused to give her son up, the brave young boy threw himself into the crater to appease the god and save the kingdom from ruin.
Tabitha and I woke up at 1 am to start a four hour drive to the park where Bromo and three other volcanoes reside. We had to stop halfway up a neighboring mountain to switch to a jeep that would take up up through the bumpy switchbacks to our sunrise look-out spot.We waited with about 40 or 50 other tourists (mostly native) for the sun to come up and reveal Bromo and its neighbors. It was supposed to look like this (Bromo is the shortest smoking one):

In an ideal world...

This is what we saw instead. Mother Nature 1, Fellows 0

Instead, we sat shivering in a dense cloud with no signs of anything. When light did break, and Tabitha and I could no longer hide our whiteness, we became the main photo attraction. We took pictures, allowed people to practice their English, and generally made the best of it until we began loosing circulation in our limbs and moved on to the next part of our trip: Actually climbing Bromo.
As we pulled into the base area of Bromo, about half a dozen men with horses rushed to our jeep. The local Hindu people of the area try to make a living by selling pony-rides to the top of the crater. Since Tabitha and I were hoping to get a little trekking in, we decided to take on the miniature (but powerful) volcano on foot. 

I was trying to capture the landscape. Notice the woman behind Tabitha who didn't quite the hang of horseback.

Bromo's crater!

Bromo's big brother

Tabitha and I made it to the crater and surveyed mostly the people around us taking pictures and trying not to fall into the huge crater. This actually took some skill considering the only thing keeping you from being the next sacrifice was an old, falling apart concrete barrier that reached halfway up my shins. Some local men camped out up there trying to sell nicely arranged flowers for tourists to throw into the crater and offer up their own treaty to the god. Bromo is still active and erupted at the beginning of 2011. Near the base, you can see volcanic rock from that eruption, which the Hindu locals fenced in as they consider anything that comes out of the crater as sacred.

This kept us from certain doom

A local man selling flower sacrifices

Sacred volcanic rock from the 2011 eruption

Hindu temple at the base of Bromo for the annual sacrifice (usually flowers, small animals, and money)

Tabitha bargaining for some bananas

Next up, we had headed back down the hills and toward the East Java coast. We met along the way another EL Fellow, Megan, and her visiting friend, Elizabeth. Our two tours hooked up and headed to yet another volcano: Mt. Ijen. Ijen is famous for it's sulfur deposits, which local workers spend all day climbing up, chiseling out, and carrying back down on their backs. Here we are all four of us posed in front of the "Yellow Waterfall," named so for the yellow-sulfur tint in the water. As we got closer to Ijen, we could plainly see it smoking. The white puffs billowing out of the mountain threatened to cancel our hike to the crater's edge. Indeed, as we pulled into the base parking lot, we were met by large signs (in three different languages) announcing the mountain was closed due to poisonous gases. Not wanting to tempt fate, we decided to heed to warnings and just take silly pictures at the base. Mother Nature 2, Fellows 0.

Mt. Ijen's ominous smoke

Tabitha, our guide, and myself - thwarted by poisonous gas

With Ijen in our rearview mirror, we split ways with our friends and headed onto Alas Purwo National Park at the eastern most tip of Java. Along the way, we made some stops to check out life in the local villages.

Gasoline for sale by the road side.

We stopped one place and tried out fresh coffee beans, clove, and cinnamon - straight from the plant/tree!

Plowing the rice fields with some ox

Road side fruit stand, where we tried our first dragon fruit. Delicious!

Our favorite lunch stop was this little road side diner (or warung). We ate ourselves silly for about $2 total!

At Alas Purwo, we trekked through some rain forest, and saw some wild bulls (which was less impressive to Tabitha and I coming from the Heartland of It All and way more impressive to our tour guide, who took countless pictures while we looked for suitable squatting areas). We did get to spend a few minutes soaking up the beautiful scenery of a relatively untouched beach and the oldest Hindu temple in East Java. We were supposed to stay in cabins near these calming highlights but were told by our tour guide that the cabins were closed because of a recent ship wreck that killed dozens of refugees trying to get to Indonesia and whose bodies were ending up on the shore. Mother Nature 3, Fellows 0, Refugees, -100.

On our final day, our tour guide tried to make up for some of our disappointments by taking a trip to local rubber/cocoa/Java sugar factories. I did like this part of the trip as it reminded me of Mr. Roger's Neighborhood, when old Mr. Rogers would walk us over to the magic picture on the wall and invite us to see how straws are made. Won't you join me to see how rubber is made?

The sap is collected from these rubber trees

The sap is cleaned and divided into thin sheets

The sheets are hung up to dry

The drying turns into hardening

The hardened rubber is checked for quality, cut, folded, weighed, and packaged

Cocoa, it turns out, comes from these large red pods that look like something out of Willy Wonka's chocolate factory. Our tour guide plucked one and shared with us the raw product. How did people think to turn this slimy, sour, white goop into delicious chocolate?

Our last stop, to the sugar plantation, showed us the secret to making Java's famous brown sugar. I didn't quite get the entire idea of how the sugar is made because our tour guide insisted that we use only bahasa Indonesia to talk to the women cooking up the sugar. The idea, though, is that the sugar comes from coconut trees and gets slow cooked for five hours in these giant vats.

Whew. It was a long trip, with plenty of driving, but Tabitha and I had fun learning about the traditions and livelihood of the East Javanese. What Mother Nature didn't allow for, we made up for with side trips to talk to folks and see their impressive handy work. Which, once we got passed the novelty of being white, tall, blond, Americans (with the occasional mother telling her children we were there to take them away forever - this happened), we were able to use our growing language skills to learn about the actual people. Mother Nature 3, Fellows - well, enough to feel good about.