Climbing Rinjani

Today was a VERY long day. After a sleepless night of freezing in the tent, we were up at 2am and ready to start climbing the highest point of Rinjani by 3am. How many times have I said “never again” to both climbing volcanoes and to starting a climb in the middle of the night? It’s insane so why do I keep doing it? What is wrong with me? At least we didn’t have to take the backpacks with us – they stayed behind at the camp.

It really wasn’t a nice walk. We slid and scrambled over dusty volcanic scree for hours in the dark. What made it worse was that we knew we were walking along the narrow ridge of the volcano crater which drops either side. We couldn’t see how serious the drops were in the darkness but it seemed like the path disappeared into the night either side. As we neared the summit, it began to get light and the wind really picked up. It was biting cold. Kean had lost one of his (inadequate) gloves, had chapped lips and was looking really miserable. How many times a year did this poor man have to climb Rinjani? We found him at one point huddled behind a rock shivering and trying to light a cigarette. Why anyone would bring cigarettes up a volcano in the middle of the night is beyond me, but they do like a fag here. The guides and porters are all chain smokers and proud of it.

We kept up a steady pace, but as we climbed higher the wind got worse. There were a few people ahead of us, some turned back after a while. There were a large party of Spanish people behind us but they had also mostly turned back as the conditions worstened.

Dawn was approaching and we moved slowly on all fours – one step forward, slide back two. We could see the summit about 300m away but had had enough. We wanted it to be over so turned around. We all cheered up once we had made that decision, most of all Kean. We slid easily down the scree choking on mouthfuls of dust. We stopped to watch a spectacular sunrise over the volcano illuminating the crater lake below. In the lake was another volcano – the one that had erupted in 1994 and was still active. A sobering thought. The rock around us turned bright orange in the sunlight and I took some lovely photographs. A monkey appeared from nowhere, sitting on a scary ledge. We think his job was to stop people accidentally going that way.

By the time we arrived back at the camp we had swallowed our fill of dust, were filthy and badly needed a shower and a soft bed. We made do with a wet wipe each and a groundsheet.