Mt. Agung

An active volcano in Bali, Indonesia, close to another volcano on the same island, named Mount Batur, lies the highest point on Bali, and dominates the surrounding area, influencing the climate, especially rainfall patterns. It is named Mt. Agung and has a beautiful cone shape.

From the top of Agung, the peak of Mount Rinjani on the island of Lombok is visible as well. Agung is a stratovolcano, with a large and deep crater with a recent eruption in 2017-19.

In my last visit in 2016, trips to Agung were closed, so this time, I grabbed the chance to climb it. A driver came to pick me up at 11:30 PM and drove for nearly a couple of hours to the start of the hike, which is at about 5,100 feet.

After getting registered as a climber at the office, the guide put a headlamp on me, gave me a walking stick, 1.5-liter water bottle, a bit of coffee and off we went.

It was hard to see anything in the pitch dark, and the headlamp illuminated the 300 or so steps at the very start of the walk.

The peace and quiet of the night was fantastic and kept my mind off the strenuous trail, until it couldn’t. I started listening to a fantastic new book that my friend had recommended, on audible, by Scott Anderson, named Lawrence in Arabia.

Three chapters into the book, I couldn’t focus anymore and moved to my interesting playlist of songs on YouTube, and the song by Matthew Wilder cheered me right up.

The next five hours were a constant climb in the pitch dark, scrambling over rocks and very steep terrain. I opted to not take any pictures but had a great time talking to all the other climbers. There was a couple from US, a family from Germany, another from Poland, a few folks from France, in all about 20 climbers and 8-10 Indonesian guides.

The initial 1,000 or so feet of climb were over soft dirt, and it progressed to a rocky terrain, followed by semi-soft rock and culminating in boulders to climb. The guide advised three stops and offered snacks, but it was too early to eat biscuits and candy bars. However, I had packed ten mangosteens with me, and I ate a couple of them at each stop.

It was around 5:30AM by now, and at the bend, I could see the dawn sun peeking through the horizon.

It was quite hard to see, however, the lights of the various towns on the Bali islands were visible and the iPhone camera did a good job of low light photography revealing the layer of clouds surrounding the mountain.

After crossing an especially steep portion, I saw a parabolic antenna just as the guide said, "we are here". I was not expecting the climb to be over. I had been noting the elevation on the apple watch every so often, and we were at around 9,300 feet, while I expected the summit to be closer to ten thousand.

Ready or not, I was at the summit, all the climbers had arrived, and we all awaited the sunrise.

The crater of the volcano was visible and surprisingly to me, it was quite small. Not only that, the base of the crater was less than three hundred feet from the spot I was standing at. The base was quite flat and had volcanic black rock on its surface.

The dense vegetation of the island was clearly visible now as the sun was rising.

The cone of the volcano was visible and the rays of the sun were illuminating the peaks of it.

Looking backward, I could see the shadow of Agung on the island and the rocky path I had just climbed to get here.

I started the descent. The huge shadow of Agung looked awesome.

The rocky path was very treacherous.

I took the lead in descending and saw the other climbers follow suit.

The volcanic rock covered surface was especially hard to navigate during descent as the they rolled down when one stepped on them.

I generally have good balance and usually right myself pretty quickly, but this descent was way too tricky for me. I fell in quick succession several times.

With the daytime, it was easy to see the terrain I had climbed to get to the summit. Various sizes of rocks were everywhere. Ascent was hard because of the steep thousand feet a mile climb but descent was more difficult. I slipped so many times, fell about twenty times and broke the skin in various parts of my body.

Indonesia is generally a warm place, the temperature variance from base to summit was from 57F to 52F, so I had not worn any gloves. That proved to be a wrong call because my hands frequently broke my fall and bore the brunt of it.

The various ways to get hurt on this mountain were slipping on the rocks, not able to self-arrest in time on a slope and getting gored by tree/shrub branches, stepping on grass not realizing they covered a big hole, getting entangled in low lying tree branches and falling over, or falling over because your feet are jelly.

The beautiful island of Bali was more visible now and seemed closer.

More trees were visible now and I descended more and more.

Flowering trees and grasses meant the hike was coming to an end slowly but surely.

The rocky path gave way to thicky packed mud, which was a tad easier to walk on, but still tricky.

The ferns and denser forest were surrounding me now and it was quite pleasant.

I lost my way and was walking through a ravine when a guide saw me and motioned me to retrace my path to rejoin the route. In a few minutes, I was at the flat surface and noticed that it was a grand temple.

Now I had to just descent the 300 or so steps to finish the adventure. My legs were just jelly by now, but I persevered.

I had been saving pictures of my apple watch face, so I had a log of time versus altitude over the whole climb and I could plot a graph of that.

I was happy to have done this relatively short but challenging climb and was ready for some hard-earned meal.

The driver brought me to a lunch place called Mahagiri Panoramic Restaurant which had a fantastic view of the surroundings and showed mount Agung in the backdrop with its full glory. It was a day well-spent.