Bromo

Mount Bromo on the left and mount Batok in the front. They are all contained inside the huge caldera of  the ancient Tengger volcano.

Bromo Tengger Semeru National Park on east Java offer an astonishing view over volcanoes. There you can hike a sea of black sand, peak at the mouth of an active volcano and experience life in a mountain village.
When I was there most people rushed the visit in one day. They went before sunrise to a view point, crossed the sea of sand, got to the rim of the Bromo and finally left around 9 to 10 am. I would advise to go to the village of Cemoro Lawang by yourself and stay there 2 nights. This will give you plenty of time to enjoy the place and avoid the crowd. Everybody rush to the Bromo between 7 to 9 am, so if you go latter in the morning it will be less crowded.

What I did was:
  • Wake up at 3am to leave the village of Cemoro Lawang and start hiking to the King Kong viewpoint. You just need a torchlight and warm clothes. To go there you first walk on a road then on a small trail. The offline map application Maps.Me has a really good map of the region, better than Google Maps.
  • Found a good spot and watched the sunrise.
  • At around 7am, instead of going back to the village to enter the sea of sand, I took the road that goes west along the crater rim. It's a long walk down to the sea of sand, but you will be rewarded by other viewpoints and monkeys. If you don't want to walk you can hire a motorbike driver to take you down.
  • I entered the sea of sand from the west and crossed it to the mount Bromo. Normally you need to pay the park entrance (317'000 rupiah), but from where I entered there was nobody to pay, so I went for free.
  • By the time I arrived at the Bromo it was 9:30 am and most of the tourist had left.
To go to the village of Cemoro Lawang by yourself, you will first need to go to the town of Probolinggo. You can easily go there by train or bus. The mini-bus going to Cemoro Lawang leaves from the Banyuangga bus terminal a bit outside of town. The mini-bus was on the Jl. Raya Bromo street just in front of the terminal and not inside the terminal. There are no timetable. The bus leaves when there are 10 or more passengers. Until it's full you will have to wait and pray for other people to show up. It's best to go early in the morning when there might be more passengers. If you want to leave with less people, you can pay extra. We where able to negotiate the total price of the bus at 450'000 rupiah. To go up we were only 3 (it was the low season + Ramadan + the afternoon), thus we had to pay 150'000 each. To go down we were 7 so we payed 65'000 rupiah each.

View from King Kong hill at sunrise. The sea of sand is still under the mist.

Tour jeeps crossing the sea of sand with mount Batok in the background.

Sea of  sand. It's black due to its volcanic origin.

The Bromo is a sacred volcano for the Hindus.

The village of Cemoro Lawang on the rim of the Tengger crater with clouds spilling like rivers.

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