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More fish, and Tom's First Volcano
Dec. 8th, 2005 05:58 pmYesterday, I got up at 3am in order to climb Mount Batur, an active volcano located in north-east Bali, in the middle of the caldera of what must once have been a truly spectacular volcano of the kind whose eruptions don't make it into history books because they tend to annihilate all local historians.
Mount Batur gets up to about 1700 metres, last erupted seriously in 1963, and is a cinder-cone volcano; which becomes very clear as you climb, the path is black volcanic sand mixed with sharp black volcanic pebbles of various sizes. "Uphill, over rocky sand, at night" was I think the worst-case situation in one of those Boy Scout work-books for figuring how long trips should take ... I made heavy going of it, had to sit down half-way up and drink two litres of water while a friendly group member fed me bananas, fanned me with a hat and reminded me to breathe, but I got up to the top.
The crater's absolutely enormous -- must be 300ft further down from the lowest point of the rim, and that's a fairly sheer drop. It's clear that the volcano's active; there are vents from which clouds of sulphurous steam issue, if you dig a hole in the sand steam comes out and you can hard-boil an egg at the bottom. At the top you can see various layers of lava; some thin sheets in reds and browns, and a great field of black basalt pillow-lava from the 1963 eruption 'where the village of Batur used to be'. Unsurprisingly, the views from the ridge walk along the crater rim to the farms inside the caldera and the orchards up on the rim are spectacular; they'll probably get back to England around the time I do. There's a small new cinder-cone built by an eruption in 2000, with a large permanently-fuming vent and a sulphur deposit building up; it's somewhat inaccessible, and would have been unwise to visit in any case, but looked good through binoculars.
Off the volcano around 10am, and spent a couple of hours lying in a hot-spring, my activity limited to moving to put another part of my body under one of the lovely strong jets of hot water coming out of the statues by the side, or from time to time doing a couple of lengths of the adjacent cold swimming pool. Then a long drive to the north-west corner of Bali, and a night at a hotel with a fantastically uninterrupted sea view.
This morning we went to Pulau Menjangan, a smallish island surrounded by wonderful reefs. With greater attention to sun-tan lotion, and wearing a stylish T-shirt at all times in the water, I don't seem to have burned so much; there were several sorts of coral, bright blue star-fish, a sea-cucumber, schools of tiny iridescent-blue fish, clams built into the reefs with their mouths fringed in a royal blue fading to black, a truly garish fish with a pink head with green stripes and blue fins, and even an anemone with a little Nemo sitting inside it. Though fish are probably not an adequate reason for emigration, this was very much the sort of thing to give me the urge to make my new job Somewhere With Reefs: do coastal Australia's universities provide enough mathematicians for their local needs?
Mount Batur gets up to about 1700 metres, last erupted seriously in 1963, and is a cinder-cone volcano; which becomes very clear as you climb, the path is black volcanic sand mixed with sharp black volcanic pebbles of various sizes. "Uphill, over rocky sand, at night" was I think the worst-case situation in one of those Boy Scout work-books for figuring how long trips should take ... I made heavy going of it, had to sit down half-way up and drink two litres of water while a friendly group member fed me bananas, fanned me with a hat and reminded me to breathe, but I got up to the top.
The crater's absolutely enormous -- must be 300ft further down from the lowest point of the rim, and that's a fairly sheer drop. It's clear that the volcano's active; there are vents from which clouds of sulphurous steam issue, if you dig a hole in the sand steam comes out and you can hard-boil an egg at the bottom. At the top you can see various layers of lava; some thin sheets in reds and browns, and a great field of black basalt pillow-lava from the 1963 eruption 'where the village of Batur used to be'. Unsurprisingly, the views from the ridge walk along the crater rim to the farms inside the caldera and the orchards up on the rim are spectacular; they'll probably get back to England around the time I do. There's a small new cinder-cone built by an eruption in 2000, with a large permanently-fuming vent and a sulphur deposit building up; it's somewhat inaccessible, and would have been unwise to visit in any case, but looked good through binoculars.
Off the volcano around 10am, and spent a couple of hours lying in a hot-spring, my activity limited to moving to put another part of my body under one of the lovely strong jets of hot water coming out of the statues by the side, or from time to time doing a couple of lengths of the adjacent cold swimming pool. Then a long drive to the north-west corner of Bali, and a night at a hotel with a fantastically uninterrupted sea view.
This morning we went to Pulau Menjangan, a smallish island surrounded by wonderful reefs. With greater attention to sun-tan lotion, and wearing a stylish T-shirt at all times in the water, I don't seem to have burned so much; there were several sorts of coral, bright blue star-fish, a sea-cucumber, schools of tiny iridescent-blue fish, clams built into the reefs with their mouths fringed in a royal blue fading to black, a truly garish fish with a pink head with green stripes and blue fins, and even an anemone with a little Nemo sitting inside it. Though fish are probably not an adequate reason for emigration, this was very much the sort of thing to give me the urge to make my new job Somewhere With Reefs: do coastal Australia's universities provide enough mathematicians for their local needs?
