Day before the hike

At 10am Asmuni from the Rinjani Trek Center (http://www.lomboksumbawa.com/rinjani/index.htm) still hadn’t turned up. In daylight we could really see that the Intan Lombok Resort had seen better days, but it would have been nice to spend a few hours lounging around the pool nevertheless. Instead we were sitting in the lobby waiting for Asmuni. I called him. I couldn’t tell if he had remembered us or was bluffing. There had been some mix up, but he was coming to get us in 15 minutes. 15 minutes turned out to be an hour and a half, but at least he came. We hit the road and headed towards the tiny village of Sembalun Lawang where we would start our 4 day. We drove for a few hours, mostly through national park and finally arrived mid afternoon. We met our guide Kean and got chatting to a Swiss couple also starting the trek tomorrow.

That night we stayed in a kind of homestay lodge – probably the most basic place I have ever stayed in (apart from camping). It was made of woven reed and very dark inside and the 10 watt light bulb only came on after sunset. The bathroom was a room with a squat toilet (no flush), a tap and a bucket. Before I left Nagoya, I had been going for dental treatment. My trip had interrupted this treatment and I would be traveling around Indonesia with a huge hole in one of my teeth. My dentist had given me a little kit of pincers, gauze, cotton wool and alcohol so that I could clean and put cotton wool temporary fillings in my tooth each day. He stressed the importance of keeping things clean to avoid infection. This was a tricky enough operation to negotiate in the lodge – how would it be while camping? I tried not to think about it.

Outside the lodge was Mount Rinjani standing a 3726m. We knew it was high and that it would be a challenging walk, but from were we were standing in Sembalun Lawang, it looked like a little hill you could saunter up in an afternoon.