Hiking Indonesia's Highest Volcano

First published in Options, The Edge Malaysia, May 22, 2017

Pain is so close to pleasure, terror a heartbeat away from sublime beauty

SB felt a draught on the back of his neck and turned around.  The back door of the van had worked itself loose.  It was now flapping freely, exposing the luggage compartment where our luggage was stored, and some of the luggage was missing, having tumbled out of the back. And we hadn’t even started our hike.

Our journey had begun some 8 hours earlier at Padang, the hot, bustling capital of West Sumatra province, best known for nasi padang, rice with often fiery condiments.  The journey had taken us to the highlands, dense with shaggy forests and extensive tea plantations, past the tranquil lake of Danau Atas, into the lowlands with quiet villages and through a heavy rainstorm that flooded the already rutted road in parts, and finally to the village of Kersik Tuo. 

There were seven of us, city-dwellers who sometimes craved freedom from the connected, digital world, to embark on the journey of self-discovery in the outdoors. Our objective was to climb Gunung Kerinci, at 3805 masl, the highest volcano in Indonesia.

Kersik Tuo is a small village with a population of a few thousand people employed in the tea, vegetable and cinnamon plantations of these tranquil highlands.  I was told that daily, trucks laden with vegetable produce travel a day and a night to the province of Lampung in southern Sumatra, undertake the ferry ride to Java, and onto another days’ drive to reach the markets of Jakarta.

The people of Kersik Tuo deem it a disgraceful thing to take another persons’ possessions, and so we recovered the tumbled luggage, waiting in peoples’ porches and by the roadside, a little muddier and worn for the inadvertent adventure, but intact.  

Gunung Kerinchi was sublimely beautiful, a graceful inverted cone rising above the tightly-cropped tea plantations. It was deceptively placid, yet the next morning, when we stepped into the forest at the foot of the mountain, the dense wildness asserted itself.  The path, a broken tangle of tree roots and mud, wended into the green maze, dappled with sunlight struggling through the canopy far above.

Early in the hike, there was a mighty hooting and echoing above us in the canopy, followed by a handsome and magnificent black-handed gibbon crashing into the canopy directly above us, and perching there deliberately, an alpha male asserting his displeasure at our presence in his territory.

Slowly at first, and then increasingly steeply, the path climbed into the incandescent green light of the forest, dripping with moisture; I paused in wonderment where the scene opened onto a panorama of unbroken, moss-draped forest, with mist rising like a ghostly hand.  There were other hikers with their guides and porters along the way, and the friendly exchanges of fellow travelers on a shared journey.

If I tarried long enough, I could lose myself in the magnificent green forest, and so it was dangerous to tarry, for the imagination often blurs with reality.  We stopped at a green glade where the trees overhead were coated in moss and fronds, where there was a view to the lowlands below the clouds, and where the air was moist and cool, the light green and misty.

The mud was thick and slimy in many places, as if a herd of careless elephants had trampled though the verdant forest, and there were sections where the path was submerged beneath brown water. It was gritty mud, for this was volcanic soil, dark and fertile.

By early afternoon, we were established in camp, a comfortable cocoon nestled in a hollow of the forest of the mountainside, a little above 3000 masl. The weather was mild, and we were dry. There was litter aplenty along the trail, and mounds of mouldering debris, of climbers who had come to paradise and left a piece of their ugliness behind.

We started off too late the next morning to catch the first blush of daylight, but slowly, the dark forest around us lightened, and I could switch off my head-mounted torch, to focus on climbing the steep, deeply-eroded trough that was the trail towards the summit.  We broke above the treeline, above a foamy sea of clouds that crashed silently against the immovable mountain. This was Shelter 3, with a colourful assortment of tents, while above, was only stony rock, and the path that wended its way upwards, along a ridge, onto another, and up a steep spine, until, craning our heads upwards, we could see the summit far above.

Above the mossy, low scrub, the path turned stony, unlike the scree-covered slopes of some other volcanoes. The footing was firmer, yet the sharp stones underfoot could shift and give way suddenly.  There were deep eroded gullies, and other hikers on their way up or down, but the sun was shining, the sky was blue, the air crisp and crystalline. It was a good moment to be alive.

We climbed, each of us lost in ourselves, in the monologue of raspy breath, in the careful footfall ahead, while inexorably, the distant summit approached, one step at a time.  Every now and then, I would pause and turn around, to be awoken from my reverie by the stark scene of cloud-flecked blue sky, and barren, stone-strewn rock. My companions were strung out behind, each having adjusted to his or her own natural pace.

Sometimes, when the mist arose in great sheets to blanket the path in white, hikers stumbled and got lost along this trackless path.  I passed by a couple of markers in memory of hikers who had succumbed on the way, one of them from hypothermia at this very spot.

Shouts of encouragement from above; I raised my head, and I was at the summit, a narrow flat ridge, with a small cairn of stones to mark the highest point. The Indonesian flag fluttered in the wind. A hiker inquired about the tissue wrapped around my fingers where I had bloodied them from a fall.  He took out a plaster from his rucksack, cut out a section and carefully bandaged my torn fingers. I recognized him from the night before, where he’d tarried in the rain at our campsite. I had given him a hot drink and some food, one of life’s odd quirks of instant payback.

We were on the highest point on the rim of the caldera. Just steps away was the massive black maw of the volcano, a terrifying, vertiginous drop of several hundred meters down pitiless rock into the crater below, from which a steady stream of sulphurous smoke emanated.  Yet, as the pleasure of achievement could only come from the pain of ascent, terror and beauty coexisted just feet from each other, for around me was limitless blue sky and the world of mortal men spread out far below.

The day was clear enough that I could see, in the distance, Tasik Tujuh, the highest lake in South-East Asia, surrounded by seven mountains.  My companions joined me at the summit, Crystal followed by Megan and the others, all bound by the heady sense of a moment too precious not to savour.  SB had brought along a Malaysian flag, and irrespective of our political inclinations, we hoisted it proudly above to flutter in the clear blue sky. 

The descent was harder than the ascent. Unlike a scree slope, I could not dig in and slide down, yet the stony soil could shift, and a tumble on the sharp stony slope could be dangerous. A few bruises and scrapes later, I was back at the treeline, chatting with porters who were waiting for their guests.  With the others, I descended down the terribly eroded gully to our camp for a quick lunch. The mist was rising like a fist around us, the condensation falling like gentle rain.

I understood why porters and guides wore galoshes for the muddy path as we slid and slipped our way down the lower slope. The sky was dull, and it began to rain, turning gullies into streams. Leaves glistened with water, a steady roar rose all around us, and our path glistened in the crepuscular light of the deepening gloom, yet it was like a cleansing farewell, a completeness of the experience.

It had stopped raining when we emerged in the dusky light from the forest, and the air was cool and clean.  We walked past vegetable gardens and cinnamon trees and little rivulets by the path, to our waiting van.

We bundled into our transport, wet, tired and hungry, yet sated with a sense of achievement and contentment. I turned around. There were newly formed waterfalls coursing down the sides of Gunung Kerinci, and it was completely unhidden by clouds, a dark, magnificent silhouette in the pink light at the end of the day.