So after two days of doing very little other than sit by our private pool (no one said it would be easy), we got the overnight train eastwards to Blitar. Except that we slept through Blitar and arrived in Malang instead. Isn't travel wonderfully flexible?!

Malang is a lovely old Dutch town with some of the colonial architecture intact. Most of it has been suped up but there is enough of the traditional profiles to make a stroll about town very pleasant. Also there was the fish, bird and random pet market, which was rather weird. Duncan was a feeling a little sensitive about the caged animals so he bought himself a large brownie to cheer himself up and ate the lot, feeling distinctly odd afterwards. The man seems unwilling to accept that the shiny, gelatinous, more-often-than-not green item masquerading as a brownie, is probably not the real deal. He likened his blind naivety to a fly persistently flying into a window. His words, not mine.

However, fortunately it's not all tea and cakes. We got up this morning at 1.30am. Voluntarily. After a two hour drive, we arrived at a hill overlooking Gunung Bromo.

Bromo is not the largest of Java's many volcanoes but it does have a spectacular setting as you can see from the photos. Bleary eyed we watched the sun rise, took an inordinate number of photos of a red sky and then rushed down the viewpoint to climb up the volcano itself. At the summit, there was an incredibly strong smell of sulphur, for which Duncan apologised, and we stood in awe until I had a vertiginous fit and fled down to the base, leaving Duncan in the capable hands of an inquisitive bunch of school kids. Whether they were more interested in the 'blonde' hair or the diamonte 'D' in his ear is hard to say.