Ancestry through Food: Quest for my heritage

“How in the hell did I end up here?” I thought to myself as I waited anxiously in the middle of nowhere for the third-hand van to fill up. I had already been impatiently sitting for three hours, yet only an equally impatient traveler from England with an unhealthy keenness for cursing waited with me. Both of us had come here dreaming of visions of perfect sunrises at the famed Mount Bromo, but our dreams had been deferred indefinitely thanks to a van driver who seemed content to lounge shirtless in the sun and play cards all day.

My decision to go to Bromo was split-second and impulsive, chosen while on a ferry from Bali to Java. I read about Bromo, with its eerie landscape and legendary sunrises, and knew that I couldn’t be so close to such a place without experiencing its colors and challenges for myself. I threw my other plans to the wayside and found a bus going toward Bromo, unwavering in the thought that the next morning I would be enjoying a larger-than-life sunrise.

Instead, the next morning, I was waiting for a bus that wasn’t going to leave in a place I eagerly wanted to leave. After arriving late the previous night due to a flat tire, I searched for a hotel when a drunk man inched behind me and tried to sell me a taxi ride to Bromo. I forcefully asked him to stop following me, and he reacted by what seemed like a slow-motion attempt to punch me across the face from only a foot away. That foot was the saving grace between a wide-eyed foreigner and a drunken fellow seeing dollar signs—because he missed. He then shook me, all 5’2” of me with my bulging 40-pound travel bag on my back, which doesn’t get lighter with fear. Locals quickly grabbed him off of me, and I exited the scene of my most frightening experience abroad while listening to my would-be attacker howl at me in the background. The next morning, when I finally made my way to the van that would never leave, I was less-than-thrilled to find I would have to wait for hours in the same place where I had been almost-punched the night before.

After three painful hours of uncertainty, the British guy and I returned to the hotels in town to find alternative routes to Bromo. After a random series of events, we joined a shuttle passing through town on its way to the mountain. Only 24 crazy hours later than expected, I climbed a mountain to watch the sun rise over Mount Bromo. Its beauty was so picturesque it felt unreal, and somehow I felt as if I had earned it.