The volcano trip aka the hike of DEATH!!! A blog post by Erlend again

Here in our home town (for now) in AP, we live right at the foot of a 3145 meter high volcano.
Its dormant at the moment, so there is no lava or smoke on the top of it, although the locals seemed to be a bit nervous about a earthquake in side of it a couple of weeks ago...

Anyway, a few of us foreigners here decided that we could not live for a whole year next to this... thing without climbing it at least once, but the 6 hour hike did not seem too tempting.
That is why we were quite happy when our friend Pak Puji told us that he actually owns a house in the village that is furthest up the mountain, so we could drive our motorbikes there and then, he promised, it was only a one hour hike to the top. Or 2 hours... maybe 3? Lets say 4! No more than 4.

Even though the estimated time all of a sudden had quadrupled, we thought it would be fine. We knew it would be exhausting, but we decided to go for it. After all, Norwegians are known for going to extremely difficult places for absolutely no reason what so ever... like the south pole on skis... who does that?

Our group consisted of 2 Norwegians, 3 locals, 1 American and a German.

On the way to Pak Puji's house

Getting ready to go

We parked our bikes in Pak Puji's living room (yes that is normal)

Back to the story: We drove to Pak Puji's home friday night and arrived there at about 9 o'clock. A little while later we headed up the mountain in the dark. Pak Puji decided to come with us, and also one of his relatives, who wanted to be our guide, came along. None of us found it strange that he brought a machete...
I have to say, the view of this crazy overpopulated island was fantastic up there, and it was going to get better. Our home town, whose name literally means "Three mistakes," is located at about 700 meters and we drove up to about 1500 meter, which meant that we still had to hike 1645 meters. But the trail was good, steep but good, so we went for it.

After about an hour the trail was not as good... and after a few more minutes the trail started to look suspiciously like... not a trail...

Stuck in thick jungle

When we first entered the thick jungle, we didn't think much of it. We knew the trail we were using was a small one, so maybe this was normal. But when we looked ahead and noticed that we were actually not on a trail at all, and that the "trail" we were using was being made by our guide as we went along, we knew something was probably not right. Soon we knew for sure.

Jungle so thick that it felt like sitting in a cave

We were barely moving anywhere, and we could not go back, because we didn't know how long it had been since our guide lost the trail. And because of the culture here, he never admitted to having lost it either.

It was worse that it looks, believe me!

And when we finally made it out of the jungle, we noticed that we had made our way out on the side of a ridge. It was incredibly steep. We climbed with hands and feet for about 3 hours, often up vertical grass slopes. when we sometimes made it to a spot where it was only 45 degrees steep, it felt like we were on flat ground. And if the steepness wasn't enough we were also wading through 0.5-1 meter high grass full of thorn bushes. After the first hour we stopped thinking about the fact that we were pulling ourselves up by thorn branches, because it was the only option we had.

The view just as the sun started rising. 

The population within our view is a lot higher

 than the entire population on Norway.

Sunrise

The original plan was to be at the top before sunrise, have a break and then enjoy the view. 

But maybe half way up, in the worst terrain I have ever hiked we sat dow on a nice, flat, 40 degree slope and watched the sunrise. It was amazing. Gods creation is surely a masterpiece! 

After the sun rose, we rested a bit in the sunshine.

Even though we are very close to the equator here, it got very, very cold, so when the sun rose we rested some more, just to get some warmth. 

At this point we contacted another group that had gone the "long way," and we were told that they were already at the top and had seen the sunrise from up there... So much for our shortcut...

The spot we had our break.

 It was WAY steeper than it looks

Pak Puji resting

This is the ridge we climbed. 

Again, it does not look as steep as it was

More up hill

After our break, we though we saw the top of the ridge we were on, so even though our 4 hour trip was 7 hours long by then, we continued.

On the ridge top

When we made it to the ridge top, we probably looked like a pretty rough crew. But at least we got a little encouragement up there. The sign in the picture above shoved us that we had actually made progress. It also showed that we still had 200 meters left to the top of the second highest point, which had become our goal. We decided as a group to renegotiate when we were there if it was worth it to continue to the very top. 

The second highest top seen from the ridge top

Another very huge encouragement on the ridge top was that we finally rejoined the trail we had lost 8 hours earlier. Even though the trail up to the radio tower on the second highest peak felt like a superhighway compared to where we came from, it still took us an hour to get up there. The trail was also a little steep, but the main problem was that we were absolutely exhausted. 

Reaching the top

By the time we used the last little bit we had of strength and crawled up the last few meters to the second summit, the other group had already come down from the first summit and were there waiting for us. My fried Sam took this picture as I came around the last corner. 

On the top I was very positively surprised by a culture difference between American and Norwegian culture... The last 20 meters of the hike I was trying to get all my excuses ready for the other group, because I was expecting comments like "stop complaining, it cannot have been that bad." 

I was expecting this because that is exactly what most Norwegians would say, and I am not pointing fingers here, because I would probably do the same thing myself. 

But here is the culture difference, as I crawled over the last rock and collapsed on the top, ready to defend my honor, the Americans, to my surprise, said "Oh man, you made it, that must have been a horrible climb. You guys certainly had the roughest time."

What? Compassion? No jokes and kicking the guys who are down? Who are these people? 

View!

After being busy breathing and surviving for a few minutes, we could finally enjoy the view. And what a view it is! It was almost worth it. I would love to see that view again. Too bad that it is quite expensive to be flown up there in a helicopter...

 The highest top 

At the top we got a good view of the highest top too, but when we were told that it would be another 2 hours hike, we quickly decided that going to The top was not important at all, because we had already made it to A top. And also, by now, our no-more-than-4-hour-hike had lasted 9 hours...

 The ridge we had climbed seen from the top

 The trail to the highest top

Back down 60 meters, then up 200 meters.

 Part of the group 

 The mountain on the left in this picture is 1800 meters. 

It looked like a speed bump from up there

 The group on the top

 Farmers tan and Norwegian flag... yeah

 Our friend Ragil

On the way back down

On the way back down we felt we were just flying. Even though the pain in my legs was a lot worse than going up and I could not bend my left knee. After an hour the top seemed very far away, and we thought we were doing amazing progress, the guide told us that yet again we were on the wrong trail, and heading down towards a different village... and by the way, we still had about 3 and a half hours to go...

By the time we made it to a village we were a broken bunch. Our American friend Nathan and I were taking as small steps as possible to avoid having to bend our knees, and we were all out of water and felt very dehydrated. In the village they had a little store, so we bought some of the worst iced tea I have ever tasted, but i drank the whole thing in seconds anyway...

After discussing for about 1.3 seconds we all decided that we were done with the walking, and hired a local to take us back to our bikes in his pickup truck.

The driver wanted about 65 kroner / 8 Euro / 11 US Dollars for the drive. We had already agreed among our selves that if he asked 100 Dollars, it would be worth it. 

So we could finally drive home, after hiking a 3000 meter mountain and staying awake for about 36 hours...

It was quite and experience, but it was not fun at all!