Bromo National Park in Indonesia

I’m lucky to travel quite a bit for work. This time, a dear German lecturer colleague invited me to conduct a workshop in Malang in Indonesia. As I have never been to Indonesia before, I was pretty excited to have the opportunity to get a glimpse of this country. Traveling for work is quite stressful, especially to foreign destinations, as it always means long flights from Aotearoa, New Zealand, and a significant time difference. Of course, I went to Malang first and foremost to conduct two different workshops and meet with my colleagues from the German department at the Universitas Negeri Malang. But I always want to make the most of my time at a new location. So, looking at the map and realizing Malang is a city on the island of Java and located very close to Bromo National Park, I decided I obviously would have to visit this national park. After the first successfully conducted workshop, I was picked up by a tour company around midnight to head out.

Bromo NP is a volcanic area with a few impressive craters about 50 km outside Malang. I imagined it to be a quiet wilderness experience as this area is not necessarily en route to the usual backpacker paths. Oh, I was entirely wrong! The closer we got to the park, the more cars were on this narrow, windy mountain road. Having switched to 4W-drives, one jeep queued up after the other. And I realized how ignorant I was! Admittedly, my days of backpacking in SEA were a few years ago, and back then, the crowd was European, Australian, and maybe Northern American (yes, white privilege). Things are different now, especially with (not only) the Chinese middle class emerging and traveling to places.

Eventually, we (another German, an Indonesian couple, and I) arrived at the area with many viewpoints. The highlight of the park is watching the sun coming up next to the volcanoes, which is obviously what we came for … an estimate of maybe another 4000 people, too. We managed to get a good spot at a viewpoint, more or less in front of the crowd. The surroundings were magical: as soon as there was a first narrow pink line on the horizon, the crowd got quite amazed, and step by step, you could make out the silhouettes of three significant craters that formed a perfect ensemble, partially hiding in clouds that lingered halfway up the slopes. The stars in the sky became increasingly invisible the more the sun came out. The moment when the yellow ball made its appearance on the horizon, people around us started posing for pictures. In astonishment, we witnessed a lot of young women posing in nothing more than sports bras, the latest fashion leggings, Ugg boots, and in full makeup for tons of pictures. Temperatures, though, were still in their single digits. It was quite a scene: fake smiles, photographers who shooed away people standing in their way. Some were posing in stylish mountain apparel but quite impractical in the wild. Such a fascinating place like Bromo was dwarfed into a backdrop.

After about 30 minutes, the spook was over, and people headed down from the viewpoints back to the cars. We made our way to a plateau between two craters, along with hundreds of them. I hoped to have the chance to head up to the crater rim. Not quite yet: our car stopped on the sandy plateau with all the other vehicles. Our driver enthusiastically offered to take pictures, but to his vast disappointment, I turned this down, not without suddenly realizing all the other people got their pictures taken while posing with the jeep, on the jeep’s roof, sitting cheerfully inside the jeep. The national park is a stage for Instagramable pictures! Eventually, we made it to a spot where a pedestrian autobahn made its way up to the rim of a crater. Many people took a horse to cover the maybe 1.5 kilometers. People populated the narrow paths at the rim like ants along the steep drop to look down into the crater. Ever new clouds of smoke indicated that the volcanoes in the area are far from being extinct. Photos were taken, and we rushed back to the car, where the Indonesian couple waited for us in the shade as they didn’t want to pay for a horse and didn’t feel energetic enough to walk. Before we made our way back to Malang, we stopped a couple of more times along the way that were popular spots to take their picture, but with the astonishing nature of the park as a stage and not as the main protagonist. From time to time, it was pretty challenging to go along with this kind of tourism that focuses on something different from what I expected. Ultimately, we could also ease our driver’s disappointment with our ever-continuing refusal to pose for the kind of pictures 99,9% of the other visitors posed for by giving in to appear in a testimonial video for his company—the white western prey. 

I’m happy, though, that I made the trip and got a tiny glimpse of the fantastic nature Indonesia has to offer.