After brief stop in Singapore, we took the early morning ferry from Singapore to Balam. Our original plan had been to catch the next ferry to Pekanbaru on mainland Indonesia but the ferry had already left! So we made a split second decision to catch the only remaining ferry of the day to Dumai (also on mainland Indonesia) and jumped 'James Bond" style onto the boat as it was pulling away from the harbour! After 8 hours sailing we arrived at the port and made the call to catch the overnight local bus to the tourist town of Bukittingi.

Over the next 2 weeks we made our way from Sumatra to Java calling at Padang, Bandalampung, Bandung, Surrabaya and Probolinggo. Unfortunately, most of the places we visited were business cities and not really set up for tourists. To be honest there wasn't a huge amount to do and we felt like we were constantly on long overnight bus journeys. We had also tried to get on a trip to visit Krakatau but the trip cost a small fortune and would have meant selling a kidney or something! But we were rewarded when we finally got to Mount Bromo National Park on the East side of Java. This was brilliant as I'm sure you'll agree from the photos. The National Park contains two very active volcanoes. Mount Bromo is the first and we climbed to the crater rim on the first day. On the second day, we got up at 3am and climbed 5 miles to the viewpoint where we watched the sunrise over the mountains. The scenery was absolutely breathtaking and you see the volcano in the distance? Yes, well that one kept blowing a puff of ash every 5 minutes or so! Very exciting! Definitely the highlight of Sumatra and Java!!