Batur Volcano

Besides the vanilla Instagram tours, Bali also offers some proper outings. For example, you can climb an active volcano to watch the sunrise.

The volcano is called Batur. The trek starts insanely early. They pick you up at your hotel at two in the morning and take you to a campsite, where they force half a liter of coffee into you and feed you Nutella pancakes.

It’s so dark you can shoot the Milky Way on your phone.

Before the climb, the guides pray at a Hindu altar.

The trek is fairly easy. Even smokers and overweight people make it up. I barely noticed the mountain and climbed without a break. From the top there’s a great view of the neighboring volcano.

Crowds at the top.

The first rays of sunshine appear.

The neighboring mountains emerge from the shadows.

Vendors walk around the mountain with trays, selling snacks and blankets. Everyone showed up in shorts, after all, and it’s cold at the top.

Time for a time-lapse.

Well, that’s pretty much it: then a cloud rolls onto Batur, and you can’t see a damn thing for several hours.

However, Mount Batur is a real active volcano, so you can walk a little farther, right up to the crater. It’s somewhere over there by the edge, where you can easily slip and go flying down.

There’s one corner of Batur where steam pours out. This patch of ground is very close to the vent. Deep underground there’s lava so hot that the soil and rocks heat up for many meters, all the way to the surface.

That’s where the steam comes from. So it isn’t smoke, which would come from burning lava, but steam — the result of the soil heating up.

In some places it’s so hot you could boil eggs or light a cigarette.

Suddenly you don’t need the blanket anymore. It’s so hot and humid that sweat pours off you.

You can find solidified lava on the slopes.

And in general, the way down is much more beautiful than the top.

Below are rice fields and vegetable gardens. The landscape looks like Africa.