After making the long trek by bus across Eastern Java, Jan and I finally made it to the cultural capital of Indonesia, Yogyakarta. As the cultural capital, the town is filled with vendors selling locally made silver jewlrey, batiked textiles, and a whole host of other artwork and handycrafts.
Jan and I only had one full day in Yogya, but we made the most of it by visiting the main walking street, central temple and a ton of small vendors. At the end of our day there, we got on a high speed train toward Bandung, a short ride outside of Jakarta. Pics.
Our base of operations, the train station, was naturally an excellent place for photos.
Pedicabs lined up, waiting for unsuspecting tourists.. like us!
Gamelan, traditional Indonesian music being played at the Kraton.
After sunrise at Borobudur, Jan and I headed over to the Hindu Temple of Prabanan. The temple’s design and construction is a stark contrast to the looks of Borobudur. Although the main temples still stand, Java’s 2006 earthquake destroyed almost all of the peripheral temples, leaving only foundations. Reconstruction efforts continue, and we were lucky enough to arrive just weeks after the main temple was reopened. Pics.
Leg two of our journey across Java took us to the foot of Mt. Bromo, a stratovolcano that lies smoking inside the Tengger caldera. Pics.
After a long enough drive from Mt. Ijen to the mountains surrounding Mt. Bromo, we arrived in the mountain town of Sukapura to check in to the Yoschi Hotel. Nestled high up in the mountains, our perch gave us incredible views of the surrounding fog blanketed mountains, with agricultural plantations rising up on the surrounding hillsides.
Jan and I spent the evening walking around the small farming village, and then had a quick dinner at the hotel before going to bed early. Another 3am wakeup, and we were off in our Toyota Land Cruiser towards Bromo. Notably, the mountain guides in the area have maintained an absolutely enormous fleet of old school original Toyota Land Cruisers, which are almost exclusively used on Mt. Bromo. The vehicles are in good condition, despite their age, and have fresh paint jobs. We drove through the night high up into the mountains, finally arriving pre-dawn at the Mt. Bromo overlook.
Since it was Easter weekend, the overlook area was packed with Indonesians on holiday. Despite the crowds, I managed to work my way to the front for a perfect view of the valley below. As the sun started to rise, the beautiful valley was revealed, with the smoking Mt. Bromo crater in the distance. The changing colors as the sun rose were beautiful, and morning air was peaceful – despite the kids all around us!
Mount Bromo (Indonesian: Gunung Bromo), is an active volcano and part of the Tengger massif, in East Java, Indonesia. At 2,329 metres (7,641 ft) it is not the highest peak of the massif, but is the most well known. The massif area is one of the most visited tourist attractions in East Java, Indonesia. The volcano belongs to the Bromo Tengger Semeru National Park. The name of Bromo derived from Javanese pronunciation of Brahma, the Hindu creator god.
Mount Bromo sits in the middle of a vast plain called the “Sea of Sand” (Javanese: Segara Wedi or Indonesian: Lautan Pasir), a protected nature reserve since 1919. The typical way to visit Mount Bromo is from the nearby mountain village of Cemoro Lawang. From there it is possible to walk to the volcano in about 45 minutes, but it is also possible to take an organised jeep tour, which includes a stop at the viewpoint on Mount Penanjakan (2,770 m or 9,088 ft) (Indonesian: Gunung Penanjakan). The best views from Mount Bromo to the Sand Sea below and the surrounding volcanoes are at sunrise. The viewpoint on Mount Penanjakan can also be reached on foot in about two hours. From inside the caldera, sulfur is collected by workers.
Depending on the degree of volcanic activity, the Indonesian Centre for Vulcanology and Disaster Hazard Mitigation sometimes issues warnings against visiting Mount Bromo.
After witnessing the sunrise from our viewpoint on Mt. Penanjakan, we climbed back in the Land Cruiser and journeyed down to the Sea of Sand, which rests directly at the bast of Bromo. A quick 30 minute hike across the ash field, and we had reached the grouping of Bakso vendors, horses, and pilgrims coming to offer flowers to the mountain. Jan and I stopped for a hot bowl of Bakso, a traditional javanese meatball soup, sold out of mobile kitchens mounted on motor bikes.
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At the top of the crater rim, we could see down into the smoking acid lake.
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High up in the mountains of East Java, Indonesia, Mt. Ijen’s crater smokes and bubbles with sulfur gas. The sulfur hear leaks out of the volcanic crater in a giant plume of smoke, and local miners, wearing little more than gas masks, collect the sulfur and hike it out of the crater on their backs.
After returning to Bali from Komodo, Jan and I decided to travel together for a bit. Our schedules were compatible, and we both had to meet people in the western part of Indonesia around the same time. After a good experience on the boat with Perama Tours, we decided to book with them again on a westward leg which would take us from Bali across to Java, onto Mt. Ijen, then Mt. Bromo, and finally dropping us off in centrally located Yogyakarta. Pics.
The first leg of our journey was getting out of Bali. We rode by minibus from Kuta, Bali up to the northwest corner of the island. From there, a quick car ferry took us across, and then we boarded another minibus to Ijen.
Once we got to Java, we realized that the otherwise excellent Perama Tours was actually just selling us a transportation ticket with a number of different carriers, with varying levels of quality. The transportation worked, but overal I think we would have preferred a bit better transportation, and drivers who spoke better English. I can’t recommend the transportation carriers that Perama Tours contracts with on Java. However, the actual locations of our journey through Java were absolutely incredible. Perama Tours, you need to inform your customers of exactly how you arrange the transportation, and state clearly in your brochure that the drivers do not speak english and are unable to provide any information or support. More info on our tour package – note that while the things we saw on this tour were great, the organization by Perama Tours left a lot to be desired.
Anyway, after a bit of a drive across Java, and an epic ascent up into the mountains around Mt. Ijen, we arrived for the night at the former Dutch Coffee Plantation of Kaliklatak and settled in for the night.
An early morning 3am wakeup, and we were off across the mountains towards Mt. Ijen. Sunrise was beautiful, and a bit apocalyptic in feeling. In addition to the mist covering the flanks of the stratovolcano, wisps of toxic sulfur gas wafted from the crater, mixing with the mist. As we hiked up the side of the volcano to the crater rim, the smell of sulfur became stronger and stronger. There’s one main trail connecting the village at the base to the mining area, and that trail is used by both tourists as wll as the sulfur miners themselves. On our way up, we saw a number of miners, each carrying close to 100kg of sulfur on their backs. The trail was littered with pebbles of yellow sulfur, which stuck out from the black background of volcanic ash.
More on Ijen, from Wikipedia:
The Ijen volcano complex is a group of stratovolcanoes, in East Java, Indonesia. It is inside a larger caldera Ijen, which is about 20 kilometers wide. The Gunung Merapi stratovolcano is the highest point of that complex. The name of this volcano resembles that of a different volcano, Mount Merapi in central Java, also known as Gunung Merapi; there is also a third volcano named Marapi in Sumatra. The name “Merapi” means “fire” in the Indonesian language.
West of Gunung Merapi is the Ijen volcano, which has a one-kilometer-wide turquoise-colored acid crater lake. The lake is the site of a labor-intensive sulfur mining operation, in which sulfur-laden baskets are carried by hand from the crater floor. The work is low-paid and very onerous. Workers earn around $5.50-$8.30 (Rp 50,000 – Rp 75,000) per day and once out of the crater, still need to carry their loads of sulfur chunks about three kilometers to the nearby Pultuding valley to get paid.[1]
Many other post-caldera cones and craters are located within the caldera or along its rim. The largest concentration of post-caldera cones forms an east/west-trending zone across the southern side of the caldera. The active crater at Kawah Ijen has an equivalent radius of 361 metres (1,184 ft), a surface of 0.41 square kilometres (0.16 sq mi). It is 200 metres (660 ft) deep and has a volume of 36 cubic hectometres (29,000 acre·ft).
In 2008, explorer George Kourounis took a small rubber boat out onto the acid lake to measure its acidity. The pH of the water in the crater was measured to be 0.5 due to sulfuric acid.[2]
At the lip of the crater, there were a fair number of tourists, and a clear view down to the smoking sulfur lake and sulfur vents below. The wind was blowing the day we arrived, and everyone we talked to – even the miners, said that there was no way we could descend into the crater – if the winds changed and blew the gas towards us, without masks, we risked suffocation and poisoning.
However, Jan and I had come too far, and gotten too excited about this place to just give up and go home. After evaluating the wind conditions for a while, we decided to try the hike into the crater anyway, and just hope that the winds didn’t shift on us. As we started the treacherous decent, we were accompanied by two other Chinese tourists – and watched by the 100 or so other tourists who told us we were crazy for trying.
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At the bottom of the crater, it looked like another planet. Sulfur coated all the rocks, and everything. As light wisps of gas drifted over us, we could feel it collecting on our sweaty skin, and in our lungs. Luckily it was only wisps, and not full clouds of gas. There were two miners at the sulfur vents when we arrived. In addition to mining the sulfur, they were taking small amounts of the hot liquid sulfur and pouring it into molds for tourist trinkets. It was certainly very strange to see a Hello Kitty figurine made out of pure sulfur. One of the miners, wearing a gas mask, took us over to the actual vents, and showed us how they break up the slabs of cooled sulfur into chucks small enough to hike out. We were right on the edge, about 2 feet from the deadly sulfur vents – and luckily the wind didn’t shift.
After making it safely out of the crater – with only one serious cloud of gas drifting over us and choking us for a brief moment, we stopped at a little cafe on the hillside for a “hooray we survived” refreshment, and then headed off to the next stop – Mt. Bromo.
After taking part in Ana and Andang’s beautiful wedding, I went the next morning with my group of girls to explore Yogyakarta’s Batik industry. Yogyakarta is knows as the cultural capital of Java, and one of the crafts that they do there is Batik.
Waking up in the morning at a five star hotel is not without its perks, including a very complete breakfast buffet, and classy transportation.
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Batik, with the wax masks laid down by hand.
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For higher volume batik, the men use metal stamps to lay down the wax.
Rich dyes are used.
The original designs are traced by hand, before the women retrace the pencil marks with wax.
Jessica learning how to trace the intricate patterns.
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The women work in large warehouses, and sit in social circles, chatting while they trace.
After switching to a Java server called “Blender”, Twitter really cut down search latency. Good to see that they’re migrating away from Ruby over to a Java server. Hopefully this will allow them to continue to scale, and keep latencies low even in mega crunch times, such as natural disasters or political uprisings..
In the spring of 2010, the search team at Twitter started to rewrite our search engine in order to serve our ever-growing traffic, improve the end-user latency and availability of our service, and enable rapid development of new search features. As part of the effort, we launched a new real-time search engine, changing our back-end from MySQL to a real-time version of Lucene. Last week, we launched a replacement for our Ruby-on-Rails front-end: a Java server we call Blender. We are pleased to announce that this change has produced a 3x drop in search latencies and will enable us to rapidly iterate on search features in the coming months.
