Ringing in the New Years with a Volcano& Epic Traffic jam

We spent the New Year on an epic trip to the Volcano Bromo. I booked the tour in Yogyarta that advertised a 9 hour bus ride to Bromo on Dec 31st, hotel, 3am jeep up the mountain to view the volcano on the morning of Jan 1st, jeep to the volcano crater, breakfast at the hotel and then 9 hr bus to Bali.

Well...... that is not exactly how it went. Oh it started out well enough, the bus picked us up at our hotel at 7:30am in Yogyakarta. After it picked up 7 other victims (err I mean passangers) we headed out. Now my guide book says that it is a 9 hr trip to Bromo, and in fine print it says "may take longer on holidays". This should have been in bold because it ended up taking us 14 hours, since Duh New Years Eve is a holiday. The hotel was pretty crappy, but by that time we didn't care we just needed a place sleep. Of course it was New Years so the fire works started at midnight and went for at least an hour. Luckily Jas slept right through it, but I ended up with only a couple hours of sleep.

Next morning we were up at 3:30AM for the jeep ride 19 or so kilometers up the mountain. First we went to Pananjakan (nearby view point) to view the Bromo caldera at sun rise. It was spectacular. The grey cone rising out of the base of the caldera was really cool to see. It was quite a climb and I had to carry Jas most of the way. She did really good on the climb but wasn't as impressed with the view as I was.

Base of the volcano crater, we didn't really get much farther.

Next the jeep drove us down into the crater and dropped us off for the climb to the active cone. Jas and I got about 1/3 of the way up when I realized we wouldn't make it in time to meet our jeep again, so we didn't actually get to the inner rim of the active cone. Bummer. There were horses that you could hire to take you up but I didn't think we would need them til too late. Oh well, I see it as one of those compromises I will have to make on this trip to accomodate Jas.

Up to this time in the tour all is going well and mostly according to plan. At this point I feel the need to mention that Bromo is a major destination for Indonesians enjoying a New Years day holiday. So the mountain was crowed, really really crowded. I will also point out that the majority (80% or more) of Indonesians travel on motor bikes.

This leads us to what I am going to easily call the worst, most epic traffic jam I have ever seen. It was only 19km from the crater rim to our hotel, but it is a 1-1/2 lane road and traffic rules in Indo are more considered a suggestion than a rule. So tens of thousand of motor bikes and cars were trying to surge up and down this road at the same time creating complete gridlock. It took us FIVE HOURS to go the first half of that distance. Yes, you heard me 10 km in 5 hours. That is a rate of 2 km/hr. Jas could have walked it faster. If we had known at the beginning it would take us that long we would have walked it too, but hind sight is 20/20 eh?

Jasmine was a ROCK STAR during this experience. She hardly whined at all. And the 5 other people deserve major cudos for being so kind to her. So thanks big time to the French couple, the Japanese lady, and the two American/Canadien english teachers for spending about 34 hours in minibuses/jeeps with us in just under 48 hours.

Just a small part of the traffic jam

After we finally made it to our hotel, 5 hours late to make our bus to Bali, our tour company arranged a special mini-bus to take us that afternoon to Bali (another 9 hours) arriving in Lovina at 2 am ready to sleep on anything flat. Luckily we found a decent hotel pretty quick where we both collapsed into a coma til morning,

I never would have planned on this much bus/travel time for Jas but she did really good, probably better than me, since I don't really sleep on buses and thus went with about 5 hours of sleep in all that time.
So what did you do to ring in 2012?????