Bali Borobodur | Climbing Mount Batur | Panorama of Bali

This is the last post on the Bali Borobodur Trip 2010 with Shouters from shoutoutlounge.com. Miraculously, after that shouting, no one gets a sore throat.

Mount Batur, a sleeping volcano. Dare you climb it? We walked to the right peak thinking that was the volcano…. until from far far away, we ate our lunch and saw that we were overlooking the crater!

Have we had the fear it would erupt? Of course! There were billows of smoke coming out of the cracks around the crater. At least we would have died taking nice eruption pictures. LOL. (choi choi choi! touch wood!)

Going back to square one, we are now standing on Mount Badur (a mountain not many will climb because there’s no real solid trail such as those found in Kota Kinabalu).

The tour guides are ‘free of charge’ as they hand hold you up the mountain of loose rocks, ashes and soil, piggybacking bottles of coke that costs RM7.50.

Yes, you will feel compelled to at least buy a bottle from them, though optional, for they will narrate their lives, their families, the school had to attend later after leading you up and down the 6 hour ordeal.

Starting off 5am, we trailed in the dark for 2-3 hours before reaching the lower part of the crater. That’s where most of the bloggers just stop while danielchew.net and chongdavid.com heads up the mountain of ash to the peak of the crater’s ears.

From there, we had free hard-boiled eggs to eat, cooked in the deepest dungeon (1 foot deep) of steam smoke and sulfurous fumes. Put your eggs there for 10 minutes and with an iron hand, reach in and grab them all out. Such is the life of a mount batur tour guide.

From this picture onwards, all are panorama pictures of the Bali Borobodur trip. Scaled down to fit my blog width space of 655px, you may click on the images to see a bigger version of the panorama.

Jessica Lim, blur as ever, blocked my otherwise beautiful panorama pic of the King mountain, created an interesting panoramic picture as shown above. (she’s going to kill me soon). Stitched 4 pictures together creating this flawless image, which I think she would make it her wallpaper for a week.

And I want to thank her for taking pictures of me, creating another wonderful stitch. If you have observed carefully, danielchew.net was pointing at my head… which didn’t get my attention until I made the stitch complete! That fella…. in sweet revenge, no photoshop was done to brighten his face. grrrrr……

Over here, we stood at the peak of mount batur where we overlook the King mountain on the left and the other peak of mount batur.

To the left of King mountain

Top half of the crater

This ‘failed’ panorama turned out interesting. What happened was… I held my camera in portrait fashion so it’s possible to take more clouds and more crater… stitching it together gave some problem to the exposure, developing into this natural gradient effect!

It took a lot of effort to reach the peak as there are no steps, no rocks and definitely no shoe grip. On the way down, we were literally sliding down the slope of ashes… which I bottled up some as souvenir. The only motivation why I was persuaded by Daniel to scale higher was… I’m never climbing that thing again!

Photoshop does wonders, bringing in blue and green makes the place a little too real, to an otherwise monochromatic scene.

My last pic of mount batur. At least making the climb worth it. I want meat!

The padi fields of Ubud was unique. The brown spots are trenches dug to collect water and plant padi in them. It looks like a natural Colosseum.

The last place we stayed at The Oasis. It’s beautiful compared to the rest of the hotels we stayed in. A room costs USD60@day.

Is this Uluwatu? I dunno… but imagine doing a panorama with a zoom lens. How practical is that? LOL

Lastly, color saturation makes the people look like miniatures. Why so many wanna be there beats me but we join them eventually. The temple on the right boasts to have fresh water flowing out of it while surrounded by a sea of salt water. The long queue shows how eager people are to verify that. We pass up the opportunity.

It would have been nice to take some shots of the waves splashing against the rock… if it wasn’t for the concern of wetting the camera. Salt water and metal don’t mix well.

What have I learned from this trip?

1. Bali people treats tourists like kings.
2. Be prepared for Airasia to delay your flight.
3. Bali people have a lot of marketing skills to learn from the chinese.
4. Travelling? Travel light!
5. Buy more memory cards so can shoot in RAW format
6. Bali food is cheap.
7. Bali shopping is cheap.
8. Going with this group is fun!
9. Trips quickly come and go X_X
10. Always change more money just in case you need to spend more. The currency exchange in Bali to ringgit… is horrendous!
11. get a hard case lock bag so you don’t have to wrap your bags into turkey (which  costs RM12 per time)
12. leave a lot space in your bag for stuff you’re going to buy. We 13 people, bought 30 t-shirts in total… and that’s just t-shirts!
13. eat babi guling. eat the pork ribs. 10 times!
14. learn your camera totally well first before going.
15. never ask ‘how much’ if you don’t plan to buy.
16. scrowl at sellers if you don’t want them to disturb you again with their sales petition.
17. have loads of fun!