Our initial plan was to cover Mt Bromo only, but we ended up included Ijen Crater b4 departing for the trip. With the same number of days, instead of our earlier plan of only Mt Bromo, we conquered two mountains in the end!

The team was greeted by the local agent that we engaged upon arriving at the Surabaya airport. We hopped into the vans & off we started our long journey. In between, we stopped at a nicely decorated cafe at Sidoadjo for a quick late lunch, then later at a Javanese restaurant at Probolinggo for dinner. After dinner, we continued our journey to Blawan. The winding road leading to Blawan was not a pleasant journey, according to my friends, due to the rutted road condition. However, I didn’t really feel it, as I had a good sleep in the van during the journey after the dinner. The whole journey from Surabaya to Blawan took us about 9 hrs. It was almost midnight when we checked-in to Catimor Homestay at Blawan.

The hike to Ijen Crater at Paltuding the next morning was quite a tough one (at least to me). We were told by the local agent earlier that it is going to be a 2 hours walk to the crater. I took it lightly & didn’t do any training b4 the trip since it is just a walk according to the agent. Unfortunately, it was not! It was in fact a 2 hours hike, with most of the parts are steep slopes at 45 degrees incline!

It started to drizzle during the last part of the hike, then rained quite heavily when we were about to reach the peak. Luckily it stopped when we were at the peak of Mt Ijen. We were rewarded with the magnificent view at 2380m above sea level. But there was no luck for good pictures as the weather was quite misty after the rain.