Mt Batur According to Ben

Walking up Mount Batur, or was it Mt Agung? No Mount Batur it was.

I was expecting an arduous trek up the 3000m Mt Agung with glorious views over the oceanic sunrise. Unfortunately I couldn’t explain that in Bahasa and instead got a 1700m trek to an “active volcano” which was equivalent to watching someone cook snags at a backyard BBQ.

Mt Agung looking smug in the far distance.... 

Who in their right mind wants to walk up the 3^rd highest mountain in Bali when you could walk up the highest? Or at a stretch, the second highest?  Answer - quite a few people actually.  The turnout for a sunrise on top of Batur was equivalent to a mid-season Raiders game; a few hundred decorating the stands, mostly overweight and wheezing through the gap in their front teeth, wishing they’d gone and seen a better game.

The actual crater and mountain were reasonably unimpressive in stature. I did get a little giggle out of the el natural setting in which a yoga troupe had decided to set up for a photo shoot.

The highlight of the trip for me was my guide.  He ‘speech very good England’ and we conversed mostly through the universal language of heartbreak. He told me of his beloved who had married another man a week after he left for a tertiary education, despite her mother’s promises she would wait for him to return.

His best line was when he said ‘Maybe it’s karma, you know, cause I was a bit of a player when I was young.’ Yeah... that’s probably what it was.

He then told me his new dream was to marry a foreign wife, a tall foreign wife, so his children wouldn’t be short like him. I told him of my mother-in-law. Tall, foreign, female... 3 from 3!

I should probably wrap this up with something about the universal language of love (or heart break) being able to cross boundries; be it cultural, language or even height. But ultimately it was all probably just a far-fetched fable that got him an extra 20,000 Rupiah on my original stingy tip.