6th - 10th November
What should you do after a 22 hour bus journey followed by a night of little sleep because your room is next to the main road and you get woken by Muslims wailing at 4am? Probably not climb Sumatra's most active volcano ... but that's what Sam, Nick (who we met in the minivan from Dumai), Robbie and myself decided to do in Bukittinggi.
We set off on our adventure, accompanied by two local guides, only knowing that our starting point, Bukkittingi, lay somewhere between 500m and 1800m above sea level and volcano Marapi was anywhere between 1800m and 3000m depending on whether we wanted to believe the guy in the restaurant we had dinner in, the man at the hotel or our guide, who gave us three different answers himself (for the record, Bukittinggi is at 930m above sea level and Marapi is 2891m). Just as an aside here, we have come to find that questions you may think locals must know, like “is it now the monsoon period?”, tend to provoke a range of responses in South East Asia. In Malaysia, we were told by different people in the same town “there is no monsoon period”, “yes it's monsoon”, “no it's the dry season”, “it changes each day”, “the climate is more tropical than wet and dry” and “it depends.” I guess things just aren't black and white in these parts.
The fact that we didn't know how high Marapi was and couldn't see its summit because of the clouds enveloping it, was probably for the best. We waded up through the jungle (I never imagined a volcano to have so many trees growing on it), the twists in the climb obscuring the route and giving us hope that we would come out to the volcano's rockier top part surely “after the next bend”. "Steps" would not really be the right word to use; we endured hip-dislocating affairs where we usually had to stride more than half a metre and either use a tree root to pull us up or the hand from the person in front. The guide leading us failed to react to Robbie's constant request to go at a slower pace ... that was until Robbie said he would pay him less money and then funnily enough the pace did slow down a little. These giant strides upwards, one after the other, went on for five hours, the tree root terrain eventually being replaced with precarious volcanic stones which more often than not failed to provide a stable footing. At one point Robbie and Nick appeared to be on the verge of giving up and sat on the ground. Like our guides, Sam and I feared that we would miss the sunset if we didn't keep up the pace and believed if we went on it would motivate the boys more than ever to continue (it would, of course, be outrageous for the girls to achieve something they didn't). The views from the top were spectacular, enjoyed by Sam and I alone for a good twenty minutes before the boys joined us, grumbling about the pains in their legs and cursing the whole stupidity of the activity. But the pain was soon forgotten, for a few minutes at least, as we sat down to eat our picnic, watch the smoke coming out of the volcano's crater and admire the sun descend over Bukittinggi and the surrounding mountains. Our guide then somewhat cruelly announced we weren't quite at the very top. The others didn't want to go further, so I went with him alone the last 15 minutes and we were the only people on the volcano for the final minutes of the day's light. It was spectacular and unforgettable. As it was really cold on the summit and we wanted to catch the others up who had already started the descent into darkness, the resting time was minimal, just actually enough to catch my breath again after the climb and views had taken it away.
I had not been looking forward to descending as the terrain was steep and muddy in parts and all the more threatening when cloaked in darkness. We only had three good torches for the six of us so it was a slow process as our guide had to go down a few steps and then turn around to shine the light for us. Although it was fun in parts as we met various groups of “sun-rise” campers on their way up, one group of Sumatrans inviting us to have a coffee with them around their camp fire, progress was slow with Bukittinggi's barely visible street lights never seeming to get any closer. The guide in front of me would frequently turn around and ask, "Do you want a hand?" when the route demanded a greater leap of faith than normal and I felt like asking him in return if he didn't have an extra leg as well for me. We all slipped from time to time and had a fair amount of branches poke us in the face but Sam had to win the prize for the most time spent on the ground. It was midnight by the time we got to the base, meaning it had taken us longer to stumble down the volcano than climb up it. We were quite a sorry sight as we hobbled the last steps before falling into the taxi our guide had organised to take us back to the hotel. The following morning, we hobbled down the three flights of stairs in our hotel to have breakfast and a man at one of the tables inquired, “Ah, you are the guys that did the volcano yesterday aren't you?” “I think it would be fairer to say that the volcano did us,” replied Robbie.
To reward ourselves, we spent most of our remaining time in Bukkittingi in the “Apache” bar (where I met a retired man who had grown up in Harrogate!). Really, we would be fools not to have made the most out of the cheap food and drink there. Most meals we ate, along with a drink, came to under one pound. Beer was probably the most expensive thing we could consume but at just over one pound for a large bottle, the world's economies were still in favour of us having a well-deserved drink. How so very fortunate we are and how, despite the pain at times and lack of sleep, I am loving every single day of this trip.
