The bus journey from Probolinggo to Bromo reminded of a holiday I had I. Turkey when we went up the cliff side towards the paragliding spot. The roads were barely big enough for 2 cars to fit, with what felt like vertical hills and cliff drops on the edge of the road.. Not a fan. Because we arrived in the afternoon we decided to walk to Bromo crater rather than doing it after the viewpoint the next day, which I'm glad cause I was knackered after. At the base of the volcano is an open flat plain about a mile long covered in ash and dirt and cratered all the way to the base known as the sand of sea. It was like walking across a desert which you couldn't see end to end as you'd just randomly find yourself in a cloud and completely disorientated.
I knew that there was a couple of hundred steps leading up to the top of the volcano but there was still a 15 minute climb to the steps.. Knackered! 2300m to the peak. The last 10 steps disappeared as they were just covered in ash. All that was protecting us from falling into the huge crater in the volcano was a low concreted fence which was kind of scary to think, and nothing to stop is falling back down the edge of the volcano.. As we were walking towards Bromo being surrounded by clouds, we assumed the loud banging was thunder.. But when we reaches the top it was actually the volcano, spitting out lava 100ft in the air, and huge clouds of smoke. The noise was indescribably loud. Me and Jord were stood next to each other, shouting, and still couldn't hear what we were saying.

Another thing to see whilst at the bromo mountains is the sunrise. Instead of paying to get a motorbike ride to the top.. We hiked it.. Save a few pennies! So it started at 3.30am with a coffee and a banana and we set off in the pitch black. I don't actually own a pair of trousers or a hoodie so I just did it in a pair of shorts and doubled up on t shirts. It's quite cold up here, well 15 degrees.. But that feels cold to me now. Setting off it reminded of off getting up for football at the weekend and my nose, ears and fingers freezing! It was fine once we got going though. The mountain we hiked took 45minutes to climb up which was supposed to take over an hour and we actually lost the path at one point, just before the view point, where we found an off road path with bedded down foot holes going almost vertical through long grass and trees.. Pretty sure that wasn't the path we supposed to take.. Thankfully it led to the view point where we were greeted by a German who said.. Well that's one way to do it..then we saw some lovely pathed cobble steps off to the right.. Where we should've come up.. No idea where we were supposed to catch them.. Well when the sun started to come up we had an amazing view of the small town were staying in, the huge sea of sand we walked over to get to the volcano and bromo itself, still spitting out smoke. The whole landscape was perfectly lit up and we were lucky there was no clouds blocking out the view. Well worth the trek.