Gunung Merapi

On a trip I (Laura slept in the hotel) went for sunrise up to Mount Merapi (Mountain of Fire), Indonesia's most active volcano. The last eruption was in 2006, so now it's more or less quiet.
From Yogya we started at 10 pm and drove by car to a village (about 1400 meters above sea level) on the flanks of Merapi. At 00.30 am we started our climb up to the crater (about 2900 meters high). With a break, caused by bad weather (rain and fog), we finally arrived on the top exactly for sunrise at 5.30.
Well, we could see the sunrise for a few minutes, luckily, but very soon afterwards arrived a lot of patches of fog and the visibility dropped down to a few meters... So, the sunrise I could enjoy, however I nearly couldn't see anything of the volcano.
It was a quite a hard trekking tour to the top, but to get down it was worse for my knees... For the very steep 1500 meters climb we needed about 4 hours and another 3,5 hours to get back.


View from the top: First the colors and finally the sun appeared, but the fog as well (3rd photo on the right).


The panorama would be very nice if the weather is good, but soon it was very foggy and cloudy. Smoke came up on many parts of the volcano, it's still active.


Gunung Merapi seen from a viewpoint on about 2500 meters. The last photo is a neighbour volcano which is extinct now.

On the slopes of Merapi they grow a lot of plants, vegetables and also tobacco (photo with the other volcano in the background). Afterwards they dry the tobacco leaves in front of their houses.