Rainy Dieng plateau
Now we have 3 hours to drive to Dieng Plateau, an active volcano with a sulphur lake. After the effort in the morning it’s time to plunder the breakfast box and I can’t get out of the amazement. There are milk rolls and real Kiri cream cheese. I could cry with joy! Cheese! If I had known that, I would have preferred to go to the breakfast buffet instead of the sunrise. Tomorrow morning, I’m going to throw myself right on the cheese platter and defend it with my life. Maybe I can steal a cheese supply from the buffet. In any case, I know one thing: When I get home again, I will bake everything with cheese for a week and shove a large piece of Gauda straight down my throat. I’ll probably dream about cheese every night for the rest of my vacation.
Unfortunately the weather is getting worse by the minute and it is pouring rain. Even after 3 hours of driving it hasn’t got any better. When we arrive at Dieng we have to pay an entrance fee and in addition a new guide sneaks around our car, who can sell us tickets for a special price today. Who would have thought it?
If we buy from him, the entrance is actually cheaper than indicated in the guide, but we do not get tickets physically handed out. Uh-huh, so that’s how it is. He thinks he can handle it for us, after all he works for the government. Okay, which means we’re on a bribe to a country where the death penalty still exists. Unfortunately, I don’t have an Indonesian law book at hand to check what punishment is waiting for us right now. In Germany, at least, there are already 5 years in prison for that. To be honest, I don’t really want to know, because with the amount of entrance fees we have already paid, we will soon be happy about every cent we can save. So we invite our new guide into the car and drive another 40 minutes up the mountain to over 2,000 meters.
It’s really funny, because our guide is so small and so narrow that he looks like a dwarf on the seat next to him. Every now and then I even have to check if he’s still there. Fortunately the Asians are very adaptable, because as a travel group Sunshine takes a nap a short time later, our guide is part of the party. Well, I’d like to have his job, too.
When we reach the top, the first inventive businessmen are waiting to lend us umbrellas. Fortunately, the best investment of the day was the cheap plastic rain cape in the morning, pure plastic is the only thing that can keep you halfway dry here. To get to the crater we first have to fight our way past a kilometer-long row of souvenir stands. Fortunately, these traders were not in the same boot camp as the guys at Borobodur. Since it rains and because of the altitude it is a bit colder, everyone is busy to withdraw into the dry and take out the woollen caps. Point for us, I’d say.
The sulphur lake lies in the mist, but we can still catch a glimpse of it. Despite the cool temperatures it boils and bubbles and the stench is really unbearable in some places. The good thing is that we are almost the only tourists today. Except for a few locals we are almost alone. We are eyed a bit strangely, but nobody wants a selfie with us. What a disappointment! But the landscape around the lake looks simply breathtaking. Due to the fog it looks almost surreal and smooth and the scene could come from a blockbuster. Because the surrounding trees absorb the sulphurous groundwater, everything is very light and colourless. I’m actually surprised something’s growing here. A really great place to shoot the next moon landing.
After we have made our way back to the car through the rain, we stop a few hundred meters further on at a lookout point for a lake that can change its colour from yellow to green to red through volcanic gases in the course of the seasons.
Our guide, who claimed half an hour ago that he doesn’t mind rain because he is a real Indonesian, has obviously changed his mind in the meantime. With a small umbrella, which at its size covers almost the whole body, he walks ahead and sets the course. On the top there is fortunately a bamboo roof under which we find protection from the weather. Seems to be raining more often here. The view from here is simply magnificent and I can’t believe that we are actually standing on a mountain at the end of the world.
Opposite our viewpoint there is a rock with carved steps and a skull and crossbones sign. Probably a pretty sure sign that even the Asians consider it dangerous. Who would have thought that even they once have security concerns. Time to draw a red cross on the map. A little further down, a lonely owl squats in a little wooden house whose facial expression exactly reflects how I feel after 4 hours of rain. Owl, I feel you.
Continue: Sight seeing in Yogyakarta