Today we had another early morning. We woke up at 4:00 am to drive/hike to Seruni Viewpoint, from here you can see a panoramic view of Mt. Bromo, Mt. Batok, Mt. Semeru, and Segara Wedi (“Sea of Sands”) from Mt. Pananjakan.

Mt Bromo is located in The Tengger Massif,  The area is an active volcanic complex surrounded by a plain of sand,The name of Bromo derived from Javanese pronunciation of Brahma, the Hindu creator god. We waited for around an hour for the sun to rise, we kept hiking up for a better view but we stayed in one of the middle viewpoints because our guide told us that one was the best one.

When the sun finally started to illuminate the volcanoes, we were able to see this magestic view. Mt Bromo erupted a few weeks ago and it is still active with some smoke. But the real sight was Mt Semeru that released some smoke while we where there.

After the dramatic sunrise, we saw people coming from the top viewpoint. We asked them and they told us that one was better than the one we were watching it from, so Eitan with his serious case of FOMO (fear of missing out), climbed to the top while Sarah decided to trust the guide and rest at the current viewpoint feeling tired from the hike the day before.

The way back was beautiful as the fog was starting to clear, the different lighting gave us another perspective.

Originally after watching the sunrise we were supposed to walk in the sea of sand towards the crater where there is a Hindu temple, but unfortunately because of the recent eruption, getting close to the volcano was forbidden. We drove to the hostel and our guide advised us to walk a few minutes to see the view from a different side, this time on a lower altitude… still beautiful.

We walked around Probolinggo and enjoyed the colorful houses but there was not much to see, this town is used as a base to visit Mt. Bromo.

We drove to another famous waterfall but when we arrived we were told it was closed to tourists because a little kid drowned a couple days ago. We fell asleep for another 4 hours drive to Surabaya.

We arrived at Surabaya way earlier than anticipated and the city does not really offer a lot of tourist attractions, we are using it just as a hub to take a train to Yogyakarta. We asked the hotel reception to call us a taxi to go to an area recommended on trip advisor but because of a language barrier we ended up by mistake in the biggest shopping center we have ever seen. We decided we were going to have a much needed relaxing day and went to see Zootopia (fantastic movie!), $1 popcorn and $3 movie ticket later, we were just enjoying a movie like we were home. The movie was in English with Indonesian subtitles.

Bonus pic of the day: Good luck if you ever attend an Indonesian food buffet. You might as well be blindfolded because the food descriptions are not very useful. In this case, the “Soup that have taste sour” was an extremely spicy chicken broth.