Climbing Gunung Agung
On the way from Makassar to Bali, I looked out the window of the plane and gasped. We were rounding the shoulder of a massive, nearly perfect conical volcano. It felt within touching distance, and its summit was not far below our cruising altitude. It was ringed at its feet by a layer of clouds. This was Gunung Agung (Mt. Agung), at 3,200 meters the highest mountain in Bali and also the holiest. I determined immediately that I had to climb it.
Fast forward a week and a half, and I was on the back of Komang’s scooter, catching a ride from Ubud to Pura Besakih, and hour and a half away. It was late afternoon and dogs wandered in the street as we whizzed through the villages. At one point Komang pointed, and off to the right, through the haze, I caught my first sight of Gunung Agung. It was every bit as imposing as I remembered.
I was apprehensive about this hike for several reasons. It would be my first overnight mountain ascent, I did not have a guide arranged yet, I was not sure where I would sleep until departing at midnight, and I would be hiking the more difficult of two main routes up a mountain known to be difficult.
Komang, my driver, had never been to Pura Besakih either, but when we arrived he talked to a cluster of men smoking and talking by the roadside. Turns out they were guides. Two got up and led me to a nearby counter with a twinkle in their eye that seemed to say “let the scamming begin.”
A guide is required to climb the mountain, they said. This I knew to be false, and put us on the wrong foot to begin with. There’s a guiding association, they said. That much was true according to my prior research. They were representatives of this association, and I had to negiotiate with them for my guide’s fee. Reluctantly I asked their price, not excited about the prospect of roaming this unknown temple-village alone searching for a freelance guide.
“Nine hundred thousand rupiah,” asked the lead hustler. That’s ninety dollars, or triple the fair price. I expected to have to negotiate down, but these guys were much tougher than the old ladies in the market, and would just grimace and say “not possible” to my low offers. Eventually I told them I would go get food and think about it, and this finally did the trick – seeing me walk away brought them down from six hundred thousand to four hundred fifty. Still a ripoff but I had made the fatal bargainer’s error of raising my offer too much, and too early, so I was stuck with it.
The purpose of the guiding association, by the way, is in theory twofold: it provides a fair way to allocate the small number of lucrative gigs available to the large number of poor villagers who want them, by operating a waiting list. It also provides support to guides who are injured or become old. In practice, my impression was that it was a way for a few clever older guides who had gotten tired of footwork to skim some money off their younger colleagues.
In any case, once a price was agreed upon and I sent Komang back to Ubud, scammer #1 became all chummy and led me off to a warung for dinner. A warung run by his wife, naturally. I was resigned to being hustled at this point, and he was perfectly happy to help me practice my mostly nonsensical Indonesian. So I paid a full dollar (scandalous!) for a plate of excellent nasi goreng. The wife and her friend were tickled pink when I asked for more chilies. “I told her buleh [white people] don’t like pedas [spicy],” confessed the friend.
As I ate and waited for my guide to show up it grew dark. Another man materialized out of nowhere and asked if I wanted to stay at his losmen [family guesthouse]. I declined – I would be sleeping only a few hours and did not want to pay for them. “No problem, you sleep in police station,” said my ‘friend.’ I didn’t really like the sound of that. I brought my hammock and had planned to sleep in it, but I still wasn’t sure whether it was acceptable to camp so close to the temple. Registration at the police station here is required for climbers anyhow, so I decided to go with the flow.
The officer on night duty was very kind and brought out some cardboard boxes to soften the too-short bench on which I slept. He even turned down the volume on the TV he had blaring Indonesian soap operas. The station was a single room, about five meters by five meters, with a desk and a whiteboard to list the day’s climber’s. I slept fitfully, and a few times in the night heard people come in, speak to the officer in Indonesian, and leave.
At midnight, right on time, my guide showed up. I met Gede briefly before going to sleep, when he dropped by the warung before evening gamelan practice at the temple. He got no sleep before meeting me, and I felt a little worried that he would be too tired for the ascent. But while I was still blinking the sleep out of my eyes, he was setting a blistering pace, just at the edge of my ability to keep up. We passed majestic Pura Besakih, with its enormous gates floodlit at night, took some stairs, and were soon on a brick path.
Soon Gede called a halt. We had reached a secondary temple and he would go in to make offerings and pray for safety on the mountain. By now I was huffing and puffing, and was glad of the rest. I sat on the temple steps, enjoying the cool air and the tranquility of the night. Ten minutes passed, and Gede bounded out. “Ok, we go?” We continued at the same hard pace, more steeply uphill now, and I started to wonder if I was showing the first signs of growing old. Here was Gede, five years younger, zipping along with no problems. I was swallowing my pride and about to ask him to slow down when I noticed something. Gede was always five paces ahead of me. If I slowed down, he slowed down to match, and if I went faster he’d step up his pace just enough to maintain a good distance. But he never looked back. I figure he could hear the change in my footsteps.
So I found a more comfortable pace and continue our ascent. The trail had no switchbacks or drainage, and so it was eroded into a deep gulley in many places, and had steep sections where a whole section of trail had washed away and clinging to roots and rocks was necessary to ascend.
Several times during the climb we reached a small shrine or some holy spot and Gede made an offering: incense and rice and a flower, packaged up in a tiny tray of bamboo leaves. Once we came upon a pile of such offerings in a seemingly random place. When I asked, Gede told me a group had come through a few days ago, but it had started raining heavily along the way, so their guide had deposited all of his offerings here and turned back.
We were making our way by flashlight at first, but by hour three we were out of the trees. The moon was three days past full and lit our path well enough for us to put our lights away. We stopped at another offering place that also serves as a base camp for those who wish to split the climb over two days. This was the first place I noticed that there was garbage everywhere. It was mostly plastic bottles and wrappers. Even Gede kicked his empty water bottle down the hill. “Maybe I get it on the way down,” he said when I remarked on it. I tried to pick up some of it, but it didn’t take long to fill up my daypack.
As we got closer to the top, it was Gede whose breathing became labored. The air starts getting a little thinner around 3,000 feet, though not severely enough for altitude sickness. I felt a teensy bit of schadenfreude as I powered on past him after feeling so slow this morning. I was also excited to have some time to myself on the mountain. “You can wait here,” I said, “now that we’re out of the forest, the path is clear.”
“I cannot,” said Gede, “It is my responsibility.” So I simply widened the gap by as much as I could, expecting he’d catch up when I stopped at the top.
I crossed a couple of false summits, dimly making out the figure of my guide on the trail whenever I looked back. I was navigating a rather sharp ridge, with loose gravel on either side, so I walked carefully. When the last peak came, it was obvious from a distance – I could see the neighboring peaks along the crater rim. When I reached the top, the view down into the bowl was staggering – a sheer drop of easily fifty meters.
We arrived about half an hour before sunrise, enough time to bundle up against the wind, which was quite cold. Among my hiking snacks was a bag of Goldfish crackers, a ripoff at five dollars but a blessing at twice the price. It was great to have one of my favorite salty snacks from home after this long climb.
The sky around us was clear, but below and all around was a layer of cloud. To the east, Gunung Rinjani on Lombok peeked above the white sea. These clouds prolonged and exaggerated the sunrise, granting it all sorts of colors and shapes and providing a constantly-changing sideshow. With the advent of airplane travel it has become commonplace to see cloudforms from above, but it is a rare thing to watch them from above for long enough to see them change. I watched many cumuli build into towers, change shape, and melt back into their foundations. Most dramatically, I was able to see twilight crepuscular rays. The sun, not yet risen from my perspective, cast rays of light between gaps in past-the-horizon clouds and into the atmosphere high above my head. When sunlight has a near-miss with Earth before racing off into space, this is what it looks like: massive, hanging timbers of pink in the blue twilight, converging at infinity.
I heard a shout, and then a whoop. Across the crater rim I could see a tiny cluster of figures. They must have taken the other popular route, up from Pura Pasar Agung. Gede, performing a final offering, kept quiet, and so did I. Let them believe they were the only ones up here this morning. We had passed a Jakartan couple and their guide on our way up, but they were far behind and we had this highest peak to ourselves, since there is no route from one side of the rim to the other.
I insisted we hang around after the sun rose, to wait for decent light for some landscape photographs. But really the most beautiful thing after the sunrise was the way the clouds raced west from the sea onto the land as points east became warmer.
We started down before too long, though, so we would not get caught in the heat of the day. On the way down we met another group, two Australians, their guide, and their guide’s dog. “He always brings his dog,” Gede told me. I was very impressed – after a tremendous ascent on sharp lava that would have torn most dogs’ feet, this mutt was charging right on ahead of his master, having the best time in the world. They were tired and had missed sunrise, but we encouraged them to try and make it at least to the first false peak.
Further down, we met the Jakartans, exhausted, demoralized, and a long way from the top. One of them had never been trekking before. Them, I encouraged to turn back. And maybe take a nap on the way down.
Lastly we met the King of Ubud and his entourage, climbing to a holy spring temple part way up the mountain to fetch holy water for a ceremony.
Pura Besakih in the daytime appeared transformed. The silent, solemn monument I had skulked past at midnight became a sprawling complex of temples and sub-temples. It was filled with tourists and enterprising vendors. I was followed for a few hundred meters by an adorable seven-year-old. “Buy some postcards meester?” she asked, and would not take no for an answer. “Five for fifty thousand,” she said. “No.” “Forty thousand.” “No.” “Thirty thousand .” I gave her a piece of candy from my pocket and immediately she stopped her pursuit to open it. Nice trick. Later I met a woman selling the same postcards. “Is that your daughter back there selling postcards?” I asked. “She is a good seller, very persistent.”
The woman replied “Yes, that’s my daughter. You want to buy some postcards?” The salak does not fall far from the tree, it seems.
Gede had offered to drive me back to Ubud on his scooter at a cheaper rate than I would have gotten asking around to strangers at Pura Besakih. When I saw his scooter, I understood why he could offer such a discount. First he had to pull his single rear view mirror out of some back room, wipe off the dust, and reattach it to the bike. Then we drove to the garage on the way out of town, where a guy gave it a look over, tightened the chain and filled up the rear tire. It was a rough ride, and between the sorry state of the scooter and Gede’s sleep deprivation, I was seriously concerned for our lives. But two hours later, we arrived safely in Ubud.
(See a GPS track of this route)
on August 8, 2009 at 12:32 pm
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[...] an epic overnight climbing Mt. Agung and a boneshaking scooter ride back to Ubud and a bleary-eyed visit to the Ubud Palace for Barong [...]