Last weekend I hiked Gunung Agung with some friends of mine, conveniently, both named Chris. (The picture here is from the summit, looking southeast towards the Lombok and the Gili's). The volcano crater is 10308 feet above sea and you start the climb around 300 feet. It turns out that it gets really cloudy at the peak so your have to get there early in the morning to get a good view, and since the last 3 hours of the hike is a 45˚ + incline with nothing but loose rocks and strong winds camping doesn't make much sense. The hike takes about 6-7 hours there and about 5 to get back. So with a little bit of simple math we figured that we should start around midnight. The hike was pretty tiring and combined with no sleep and hiking in the dark made it quite a challenge but the views from the top made it all worth it. We got there minutes before the sun rose (causing a bit of a mad scramble up the last bit to make sure we didn't miss it). The picture below is looking down on the top of Gunung Batar, which, around 30,000 years ago was the tallest mountain in Bali until a massive eruption of lava and ash emptied the magma chamber beneath the volcano so rapidly that the top of the volcano collapsed into itself. Imagine watching some video of that!
For more, better quality pictures check out 
No comments:
Post a Comment