You can read Part I on my Climbing Mount Rinjani Series here.
I have never been so cold in my life as my first night sleeping on Rinjani (yes, it was even colder than that time I slept in a truck in a snowstorm in Tasmania). There was a wicked chill in the air when we woke up, the kind that lets you know that winter is on its way.
Yet as the sun reared its head, the clouds dispersed to reveal a beautiful valley of sun-kissed green hills playfully sloping around us and giving way to an expanse of land that dropped below.
Droplets of dew danced on the grasslands, and off in the distance we could see Gungung Baru rising up from Bali like a castle in the sky.
We had breakfast: banana pancakes (which I have now adopted a serious addiction to) and toasted jam sandwiches, which are the furthest thing from nutritious or suitable but worked nonetheless. And the tea – oh, the tea we drank was boiling hot in the best of ways but served in these dainty plastic cups that I was almost certain would melt in my hands. There was just something about this plain black tea that was as remarkably sweet as Halloween candy, and no it was not just because I added an extra three spoonfuls of sugar (so did Taylor in my defense).
Once we finished our breakfast, we climbed our way up the hill, and I was genuinely stunned when I arrived at the top. I have seen a lot of beautiful things in my life (my niece is the most beautiful), but this – this I was not expecting. I was speechless when I saw the crater rim.
There it was sitting there like a painting and bursting with radiance under the sun. The lake almost looked like someone had taken a can of paint and poured it into the crater – it just looked so thick and so damn teal, like the kind of pleasant surprise you get from mixing the colors together. The volcano that sat in the middle of the lake was a small one, but it looked like it belonged there, like the scene would not be nearly as world-stopping without it.
I knew I had to mentally prepare myself for the morning ahead: We were hiking our way down to the crater lake, only to go up to the base of RInjani later that afternoon. Thankfully, the two American girls Jordan and Natalie were on the same level I was with their fear of going downhill, and so we lagged greatly, greatly behind.
The path was so steep at some points that I just had to turn around and wait for a few minutes to watch in amazement at these porters who did not even looked fazed by the narrow drop offs of uneven stone and earth.
What took us ten minutes to get down in proper trainers and minimal weight on our backs took them two seconds to flutter their way down. Literally, at times I would watch as they sort of kicked their feet out in fun defiance of the path below them. Every so often, you would catch an occasional wince, an occasional porter whose breath long had run away from him, but for the most part these guys seemed like they were strong enough to survive a nuclear attack.
It was some time during the treacherous journey down, amidst the bouts of angst from feeling like I may meet my death to the heat just punching me over and over again that I found my eyes welling up with tears. Randomly I thought of Sydney, and I thought of how much I hate going effing downhill and I thought of how I was trapped on this damn mountain on Lombok. One small and quiet hyperventilation, and my daily panic attack was over and done with.
Despite the few tears I shed, myself and the two American girls, Jordan and Natalie, were ecstatic that the day’s downhill duties were done and dusted. We were also pretty happy we had survived, and though we came out relatively dirty from a fall or two (or three), we came out unharmed.
We continued around and hiked our way over to some waterfalls, which filled the silence of the valley with their ferocious downfall and showered us with a gentle mist. Further down along the way were hot springs, but given that I could not swim in them and that I hate downhill, I did not see the need to descend any further. There are some things that as a traveler you become jaded about in a way, and hot springs tends to be one of those things I will not necessarily go out of my way for.
We spent the morning hiking down to the crater lake so that we could stop there mid-afternoon for our lunch stop; the view, the colors and the power of the scene changed drastically. It almost seemed less commanding from the ground level, even though everything circled around and soared high above me. It seemed meeker, quieter almost in a really gentle way, and the colors of the lake were ten shades darker, ten shades more modest than the bright, attention-grabbing teal that I saw from up above.
Our guide, E-fin, told us that the climb up to the base of Rinjani would be close to four hours or so, as it was yet another steep uphill battle that wanted to beat us down and have us basically crawling on our hands and knees to where we would camp for the night. (There is a general theme to this hike: scared of downhill, trudging uphill, porters smoking cigarettes while dancing their way to the summit.)
I made a couple of new friends who were also on the hike, and together the four of us powered through to the camp site. Mid-afternoon was usually the prime time for storms, but it seemed so far that we were in a race to beat the rain. We kept each other entertained along the way, talking about movies and television shows, different artists and ultimately giving one another the spark notes version of our lives.
We stopped but once to take in the view of volcano playing hide and seek behind the clouds. I felt trumped by its sheer size, which in a way felt like it was at an arm’s reach.
Not too soon after did that realization come that I was walking amongst the clouds – above them even, and it always reminds me of my first ever hike through the Yunnan province in China when I realized that for the first time in my life I had climbed so high I was watching the clouds roll past me at eye-level.
We finally reached the base, not as short of breath as we expected and in nearly a quarter of the time we thought it would take, and we collapsed onto the ground, happy to give our legs a rest. We passed the little water and biscuits we had left around, and again the air nipped at us as the clouds closed in on us and the clock wound down to sunset. The sky grew darker, greyer – almost like we were in a scene of Game of Thrones – and intermixed with it were these speed bursts of gold that looked like they were fighting to break through.
That’s when the downpour started.
My guide and the rest of my group had since arrived, but in the thick of the rain I could not see anything. I dashed into a porter’s tent that we held up with my walking stick to wait out the storm, hoping that either the rain would eventually stop or my guide would come out to find me and lead me to where the rest of my group was. Luckily this bout was only about 20 minutes of pounding, cold rain, which I took to be a bad sign. I had a feeling that it would rain that evening and perhaps hinder my chances of what I had set out to do: a sunrise climb to the summit.
That night Taylor and I fell asleep in our tundra of a tent to gusts of winds and flashes of lighting that kept me from being able to get a good night’s rest. All I could picture was our tent being ripped out of the ground like a spoiled vegetable.
To make matters worse, at some point during the night I awoke to what at first I thought was a wild dog but soon realized was a monkey sitting directly outside of the tent and using me as its pillow, lying back against me. I could feel the contours of its body against mine, and every so often it would shimmy the littlest bit to let me know that I was no dreaming this to life.
My second night on Rinjani went down as one of the worst and most terrified nights of sleep in my entire life – even more so than that time I slept on a cushion in a triangular-shaped maid’s closet in Malaysia with two other strangers when all the rooms on island were booked out for the Lunar New Year.
