Bali, Mount Butar

Bali is an island with a couple of volcanoes on it. One of them, Mount Batur, erupted last time in 2000 and lave flowed down the side of a mountain and partially covered a town at the bottom of the mountain.
We needed some exercise and decided to climb the mountain to see the sunrise next morning. We were picked up at 2.30 in the morning, the hike would take 2 hours and start at around 4, so we had 1.5 hours of driving to get there.
Turned out that we got our own guide up the mountain, and he seemed to be in a rush. We passed so many people on the way up that we were among the first group of people reaching the top.
On the top they had built a little hut for shelter and they also made some hot soups which was just the right kind of food after 1.5 hours running to the top. They also had beer, so of course we needed one of those too, haha. There we were standing drinking beer when the other people started arriving at the top, funny
We waited approximately an hour to see the sunrise, which was a little difficult since we were above the clouds at around 1600 meters and our mountain kept being covered in clouds, then clear and then again covered. But the patience paid off and eventually we could see the sun rise over the volcano on the island East of Bali, Lombok, really nice view with the clouds.
This place is an active volcano, it has 3 big craters from the last 3 big eruptions. There were plenty of places with steam coming out of the ground, water cooking in the hot lava underneath, kind of scary to think of walking on an active volcano.
Many places you can did down and find some lava stones, they are not only hot, but if you hold them up to your ears, you can hear the water cook inside the stones, quite fascinating in fact. Other places there were just holes in the ground where there was a constant steam coming out. They said that we could boil eggs there in 8-10 minutes if you put the eggs in the ground and covered them with wet grass. Luckily they had cooked the eggs already in our breakfast, so I didn't have to rely on Nils cooking me eggs in a volcano, what a relief.
We chose to take a little detour on the way back to check out the latest crater that was created only 10 years ago. The crater was covered in a think layer of fog when we came there, so we sat and waited for 20min for the fog to clear, it was quite a sight. This was even a small eruption, can not really imagine the bigger eruption, must be so powerful.
At some point on the way down, we ran into a group of monkeys. Apparently they were living in the forest on one side of the mountain and stupid tourists would start feeding them so that they could get a picture of them. They were quite aggressive to say the least, crawling onto and stealing the food from those feeding them. I was just imagining being bitten or scratched by one of those furry balls, ending up getting some infection? No thanks. But it was kind of interesting to stand there, having a monkey sitting one meter away looking at me as well. Who was the stranger one?
Getting down the volcano was both easy and difficult. There were areas with sandy volcano dust, it was like skiing down, jump turning from side to side. But I don't think I have ever had more black feet than after that run. The dust came in everywhere.
Further down the dust disappeared and we were walking on sharp volcano rocks which kind of ruined both our shoes. The soles were cut and torn, pretty rough terrain to climb.
If you ever make it to Bali, I would highly recommend this trip, maybe even combine it with some bicycling around the area. It is really beautiful and there is a huge lake at the bottom of the mountain too, looked really cool from the car on the way back, just too exhausted.
When we got back to the hotel around 10 in the morning, the idea had been to check out and move on. We decided to take another day at our hotel, needed some sleep at that rough morning.