Starting the hike

Kean knocked at our door at 6.30am and didn’t leave until we came out. We hadn’t realized he was waiting outside as we sorted our stuff out, decided which bags we were bringing, fiddled with contact lenses and faffed around with holes in teeth. Somehow at the end of all the sorting we ended up with 2 huge backpacks. How did that happen? We needed a lot of warm clothes for when we were up the mountain, some changes of clothes, toiletries, water, reading material, torches etc. We would be taking 3 porters with us, but they had enough to carry with the food and camping equipment, so we would have to carry them ourselves. I have never hiked with a 10kg pack on my back before and it took me half a day to get used to it. At first I was really conscious of the weight, by the end of the hike, I didn’t notice it.

After a breakfast of a not-quite-cooked banana pancake, we set off on our adventures. The porters held wooden poles on their shoulders and balanced their loads either end. I couldn’t imagine anything less comfortable, but they zipped up the mountain much quicker than we did. We had requested no chicken. I had read on someone’s blog that the porters haul a live chicken in a bag up the mountain for dinner and kill it outside the tent. I could live 4 days without meat. I managed 15 years once.














We arrived at the campsite around 4pm. There was no source of water to washing so we used our Japanese wet-wipes. I’m not quite sure what the porters did and tried not to think about it as they cooked our dinner.














I wasn’t able to clean my teeth, yet along perform the required change of filling and sterilization of pincers so I just left it, imagining all sorts of horrors in my mouth. We camped on a kind of black volcanic scree with about 30 other people. Rinjani was above us and there was a caldera below us. It was quite a stunning place.