Gunung Rinjani is Indonesia’s second tallest volcano. A constant presence on the skyline from Gili Air, we couldn’t pass up the opportunity to climb it.
From the Gili Air harbor we bought a seat on the regular public boat over to the Lombok “mainland.” This is a remarkably orderly process - you pay your 20,000 INR (about $2), wait until they’ve sold a critical mass of tickets, and then board the next waiting boat in line for the quick 10 minute shuttle over to Lombok.
We had about an hour to kill at the Lombok harbor (a little town called Bangsal) and a taxi driver came over and struck up a conversation in impressively fluent English. He had a great personal story: Many years back, he forged a bond with a Swedish client. They corresponded first by mail, then by SMS. When the Swede returned to Indonesia, he gifted the driver enough money for a used car so the driver could become his own boss. Eventually, the driver sold that first car, made a smart real estate investment, and then upgraded to an even better car. His son went to college.
We took the opportunity to get a little tutorial in bahasa, and finally acquired the most basic elements of a working vocabulary. After a week of diving, the conversation felt like one of the first authentic local interactions we’ve had in Indonesia. We realized later, however, that we never asked the friendly driver’s name!
Soon enough, we were off to Rinjani. We spent the night at a lodge in the gateway town of Senaru, and then started the actual hike the next morning.
Our overall experience on Rinjani was very mixed. This photo more or less sums it up:
Background: beautiful crater view. Foreground: piles of trash.
The Rinjani summit, which we climbed for sunrise on our second day of hiking, was truly spectacular. But the climb itself was quite sad.
Rinjani gets several hundred visitors a day, and the national park has nothing even approximating the infrastructure or preservation culture needed to support this quantity of hikers.
The damage is worst at the campsite where everyone stays the night before climbing the summit. There are no functioning pit toilets, so human waste, catholes, and toilet paper are everywhere, including along the trails between loosely defined tent sites. The food disposal norms are atrocious, so both tour groups and self-guided trips just dump large piles of half-eaten noodles, meat, fruit, and anything else you can imagine. Plastic bottles, food wrappers, and even discarded boots and clothing are also piled everywhere. There are occasional half-hearted efforts to clean up some of this trash, but since this consists mainly of assembling and then burning trash-piles, it does little except cover the sight in dark smoke and throat-burning fumes. Monkeys and dogs roam the site, scavenging among the ubiquitous waste.
The trail is somewhat better than the campsites, but not by much. It is literally impossible to take a step along Rinjani’s trails without seeing a piece of garbage or used toilet paper. Lunch and rest spots resemble smaller versions of the campsite, with all the same problems.
Rinjani is also just really crowded. You are always within sight of another group. All too often, these groups are blasting 90s pop hit from the staticky speakers of a mobile phone as they walk. Our own guide took up this somewhat irritating habit about half way through our first day’s walk.
As if that all weren’t enough, Rinjani’s porters are treated worse than anywhere else we’ve ever seen. Their loads are enormous – well over a hundred pounds – and the porters lug these enormous burdens up and down the mountain using nothing more than a bamboo rod with baskets lashed on the ends. The porters balance the stick on their shoulder, race along the trail for 20 minutes or so, take a long break to recover, and then repeat. Our guide tried to persuade us that the porters actually preferred this arrangement – while carrying his own gear in a modern, well-fitted backpack.
The net effect is that the hike up Rinjani is dispiriting at each step. You’re really just there for the summit views. We didn’t know this when we set out, so had to quickly readjust our expectations.
The summit views are, however, truly breathtaking. We awoke at 1:00am on summit day. In the darkness, you could just begin to make out the edges of the crater as we climbed. We were one of the very first groups to leave camp. Loose sand slipped back with every step on the steep climb, and we began to shed our warm layers.
Then, around 4:30am, about two-thirds of the way up, the weather unexpectedly turned. Heat drained from our bodies as a cold wind picked up, blowing in clouds across the once-clear summit. Soon, we climbed into the cold, dense cloud. The wind whipped it into thin layers of ice across our bodies. Our limited night visibility disappeared, making us feel all the more vulnerable on a thin strip of trail at the crater’s edge.
We were devastated. We had watched Rinjani many mornings from Gili Air. It was always clear at sunrise, but once the clouds came, the summit vanished for good – so we assumed that if the clouds were already in at 4.30, our chance of sunrise views was lost. We asked our guide, who confirmed that the morning weather was highly unusual.
As the situation felt increasingly dangerous, we wanted to turn back, but could not see well enough to navigate safely down. So we pressed on for a scary 15 minutes to reach a cluster of rocks that could shelter us from the wind. We huddled in the rocks at 5:15, an hour before sunrise. We put on our down jackets, to try to recover some of our lost heat. Our pants and gloves were dripping wet. It was still dark and bitterly cold. As the summit was still in whiteout, we expected to shiver until the sunrise only to inch our way back down.
Slowly, one-by-one, a few other hikers arrived, the most tenacious of the much-larger numbers that started at camp that morning. Then, miraculously, at about 5.30, the cloud lifted. A bit before 6, we decided to climb the last 10 minutes to the top.
The beauty that awaited transformed us. To the south and east, an incredible cloud inversion – a sheet of clouds spread out before us. To the north and west, clear skies revealing a view across Lombok, the Gili islands, where we had spent the last several days, and all the way back to Bali.
Despair turned to giddy laughter. As the sun rose, it slowly warmed us. A young man took repeated selfies of himself joyously shouting the praises of Rinjani and his home country of Indonesia. The energy and enthusiasm was contagious. Where we normally yearn to have mountain vistas all to ourselves, in this case we were grateful for the noisy jubilee at the top.
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