A quiet cabbage-growing village in Bali, where nothing ever happens

[fivemack]

Before the eruption, there was a quiet cabbage-growing village where nothing ever happened on the other side of the lake too. The lake is suspiciously perfectly clear, and its bottom is of black cinders.

This is an assembled panorama, because everything was perfectly still, and life is too short to take an extra wide-angle lens on a backpacking holiday.

Comments

[rezendi.livejournal.com]

Gunung Batur! I climbed it, many years ago. It was/is sufficiently active that there were still perpetually hot rocks at the top.

[tau-iota-mu-c.livejournal.com]

Needs more lava.

Although the village may think otherwise.

[fivemack.livejournal.com]

Yes, it's still active, just above the left-hand tip of the lake in the full-size image you can see a plume of steam rising from a live vent which is building itself a sulphur field.

More alarming to note is that the mountains you can see on the horizon are the rim of the caldera of Original Batur, whose explosion sometime around the last Ice Age produced pyroclastic flows enough to cover Bali in sixty cubic kilometres of ash.