Thursday, May 21, 2015

Kawah Putih, volcano crater lake

Our trip to Kawah Putih, the beautiful volcano crater lake to meet our new Indonesian friend didn't turn out that well. The night before Jack had food poisoning and was up the whole night running between the toilet and our room. We had to cancel all our plans and recover from the night eating biscuits, as that was the only safe food we could find. At least the food poisoning only lasted for one night and we felt like going to Kawah Putih the following day. Unfortunately we couldn't meet Erika there anymore. 

To go to this volcano crater lake we had to take 4 different transports and it was only 50 kilometres away. It is though very normal in Indonesia. Sometimes you have to wait hours so that the minibus is full before it leaves and small journeys take extremely long time. We had done a little bit of research and new already that as a tourist we had to pay more than locals to get to see this place. In fact local people pay only 10% of what the tourists have to spend. 

As we were told you had to buy a mask for better breathing but it smelt so bad around the crater that the mask didn't have much of a purpose. The smell of sulphur is terrible and inhaling it can be poisonous and might even end up with death. As we heard later Kawah Putih is actually one of the least stinky craters and in some places you have to wear a gas mask. It was definitely worth putting up with the smell because the sight itself was quite pretty and very different from anything we'd seen before. 





And of course many locals wanted to take pictures of us and with us. Sometimes it feels like we are in the zoo and we are the monkeys. People everywhere pointing at us, starting at us like they've never seen a monkey before and in the end taking a picture as proof. Most of the time it's nice making all those people happy with just one picture and they can show it to all their friends and family and post it on Facebook as "My foreign friends". But sometimes it's too much, specially when we've had a long and tiring day with lots of photo shoots. It's hard to see their sad and disappointed faces when we say no to a picture therefore we've only said no once and regretted it later.

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