Travel Diary: My First Hike – Mount Batur
TEA NEVER TASTED SO GOOD
The hike day started at 5am (yes it was pitch black outside), we showered, packed some snacks plus hot tea in flasks and headed for the volcano without a hiking guide as my aunt had completed the climb several times before with some of her local friends, usually the local guide will harass you for ages but we just wafted them away.
In the darkness we headed for where my aunt was sure the starting point was, key word being “sure”…. We started the hike with some wandering around lost in the village being savagely barked at by local dogs as we tried to find a “huge temple” that marks the start of the trail (all the time wishing we had gotten a guide) eventually we found it after wading through the darkness for 40 minutes and started our ascent upwards (good effort on my aunts behalf as we only had one single torch!)
The climb up was pretty easy, the ground was incredibly crumbly at some points and really dusty but you can generally complete it within 3 hours. We reached the summit a little before sunrise and managed to get a beautiful view of the sun just as it was edging over the horizon and watched as light poured across the land giving everything colour. The fact that we hadn’t got a guide really infuriated the local guides at the summit and they tried to tell us that it was forbidden to do the hike without a guide and couldn’t appreciate that we had gotten there in once piece no problem (we only managed to get away with this as we were travelling with a local because we did bump in to several guides and groups on the way up).
1st hike verdict – pretty easy, the most hardest bit was the first half an hour as you body struggles with the burst of activity, going down hurts your toes and it wasn’t massively satisfying enough to make me want to do it again.
PERHAPS A BIGGER MOUNTAIN?
Pingback: Travel Diary: One Last Time Around Bali «