During the whole of 2010, I lived on the island of Java, Indonesia, teaching English in the city of Solo. One of the most extraordinary events during my time there was the eruption of Merapi Volcano, located just 25 miles away from the city. By the time the eruptions ended in December, three hundred and fifty-three people had tragically lost their lives.
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23rd October 2010 – Kaliurang
No surprise or alarm had registered on the taxi driver’s face when, emerging from the railway station at Yogyakarta, I’d asked him to take me to the hill resort of Kaliurang on the slopes of Merapi. Having agreed a fair price, we had set off quickly through the heaving traffic that clogs the old city. Only a few hours before, I had been enjoying a quiet and lazy Saturday afternoon at home, when I received a casual text message from Irma – one of the other English teachers. ‘Merapi is erupting,’ is all she had said. Hoping to photograph the notoriously dangerous volcano as it spouted lava down its conical flanks, I had hurriedly packed my rucksack with overnight things, prepared my camera equipment, and left Solo city for Yogyakarta by twilight. As I set off on the train that evening, I had no idea of the chaos and destruction to come.
Setting off from Solo Balapan Train Station
As we neared Kaliurang, there was a toll booth on the road. I fully expected that we would be turned back for safety reasons. Reassuringly though, I was asked to pay the entrance toll and we were waved on our way further up into the hills.
In the darkness, the taxi driver strained to read the occasional small signs as the road wound up and around the mountainside, passing houses and sometimes small hotels. There seemed to be very little sign of life – no lights on in the small dwellings, and no people on the misty streets. It was very dark.
We pulled up outside a large open gateway and the driver indicated we had arrived. He spoke briefly to a lone policeman who was standing guard, and then drove away.
The policeman looked at me with a mixture of bewilderment and worry.
‘Merapi active! Dangerous!’ he said, with genuine concern.
With a mixture of my pidgin Indonesian and sign language I managed to convey to him that I was going to spend the night there, to try to see the peak and get some photographs. Obviously fearing that if the volcano erupted I might be incinerated during the night and never be seen again, he handed me a form to fill in with my name and address in Indonesia. I gave the address of the English school. There then was some misunderstanding, with the Policeman seemingly trying to restrict me to staying on a small patch of grass by the car park, whereas I wanted to explore further uphill and try to find the observation tower I had heard about. After a while he wandered off, and I got the impression that I was free to go wherever I wanted. However, the encounter with the policeman had sowed a seed of doubt in my mind – his alarm and insistence on getting my name and address made me question for the first time how safe this little camping trip might be. On the other hand, the taxi driver had been unconcerned, and hadn’t I even been charged a tourist entrance fee on the road up to Kaliurang!? There were no road blocks preventing access, so I reasoned that it couldn’t be that dangerous.
Now alone in the darkness, I switched on my head torch and looked around. I did not know exactly where the taxi driver had dropped me, but it was likely I was in the right place – a tourist area where people usually came in daylight hours to get good views of Merapi. In the far corner of the small car park I could make out a stony path leading uphill, and I set out in that direction. Passing a small mosque and a few outbuildings, I could eventually make out the shape of a two storey observation tower looming out of the mist. At the base of the steps up the tower was a small ticket office and a gate. The ticket office was deserted and the gate was padlocked shut. I looked at the tiled flights of stairs which were enclosed by waist-high metal railings. Climbing the stairs on the outside of the banister, I soon realised that it would be awkward but entirely possible to climb over the railings at the first landing and bypass the padlocked gate altogether. It was a struggle with my rucksack and camera equipment, but in no time I had scrambled over and climbed the two floors to the top of the tower.
The tower was hexagonal in shape, and open at the sides. The lights of Yogyakarta twinkled in the darkness, several thousand feet below and to the south. On the northern side, there was a ravine to the left and high forested crags above. Further up the valley and obscured by the clouds was the cone of the Merapi volcano itself. The tower was sparse – apart from a wooden bench on the northern side the only other feature was a small litter bin. Above the bench, fat and menacing spiders sat motionless on their webs. Once my camera equipment was set up on the tripod and my sleeping bag was stretched out on the bench, I hunkered down for the night. There was no wind on the mountain and the air was cool rather than cold.
The Lights of Yogyakarta from the Observation Tower
In the darkness of the unkempt garden around the tower I saw a flash of light in one of the trees. As I watched, a small green light blinked on another bush nearby. At first I thought I was seeing things, but then I realised the lights could only be the mating displays of fireflies.
I strained to catch a glimpse of the volcano in the gloom, but the stubbornly overcast sky completely hid it from view. It was the evening of 23rd October and the rainy season was well underway, if the sky was going to clear at all it would not do so until the small hours or perhaps not even until dawn. The volcano could not be seen but it could certainly be heard. As I lay there in the dark, the mountain rumbled ominously and cracking sounds rang out as boulders tumbled down the flanks high above.
Elsewhere on the slopes, seismographs in monitoring stations sprang to life as pressure in the volcano’s lava dome rose and the mountain convulsed. I later read in the Jakarta Post newspaper that about five hundred small earthquakes were recorded over the weekend of my visit to Kaliurang – a substantial increase in volcanic activity.
The noise was unsettling to me, alone in my tower. If Merapi were to erupt that night, it would most likely take the form of a pyroclastic flow – a huge cloud of hot ash that would race down the side of the volcano at temperatures of up to 1000 degrees Centigrade and speeds of up to 700 kilometres per hour. The Javanese, with years of bitter experience of Merapi and its eruptions, have a rather quaint name for these pyroclastic flows – gedas wembel which means ‘woolly sheep’ – because of the billowing white clouds that pour down the mountainside. In the rush to get to Kaliurang, I had had no time to read very much about the place, and I began to wonder how far away I was from the crater and how long it would take after an eruption for a pyroclastic flow to reach the tower. I estimated that I was 20 kilometres from the summit of Merapi and that it would therefore take just under two minutes before the searing hot gas tore through Kaliurang. It was only after I returned to Solo that I was able to measure the actual distance from the crater on a map, and I found that the tower was in fact just six kilometres away.
The Observation Tower at Kaliurang – My camp for the night.
[Photo by elsa200530, via flickr]
In the small hours of the morning, the cloud thinned out just sufficiently for me to see the black cone of the volcano rising at the head of the valley. Immediately, I was disappointed to see that there was no sign of any lava and not even a red glow from hot rocks at the summit. Within minutes, the mist had closed in again and the darkness had swept back like a cloak.
After a night of fitful sleep on the bench, the pale light of dawn crept into the valley. There was no sign of the mountain peak which remained wreathed in cloud. A few hours later and some tourists began to arrive. There were other signs of life too, as a local woman arrived and opened up the warung (hot food stand) in the car park. As the resort awoke and came to life, the isolation and strange atmosphere of the previous night receded, but so too did my chances of getting a photograph of the volcano erupting. I made my way down from the tower, paid for my stay at the ticket office and walked downhill into the village in search of a bus back to Yogyakarta. I didn’t know it at the time, but I was far from finished with Merapi. Its geological temper tantrum had only just begun.
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On the Monday, a day after I left Kaliurang, the Indonesian authorities raised the alert status for Merapi to its highest level and warned villagers living within ten kilometres to evacuate. As daylight faded on Tuesday 26th October 2010, Merapi finally erupted and thousands of people were evacuated from its slopes. Thirteen people died in the initial eruptions and many more suffered severe burns due to hot ash.
Over the remainder of that week, it seemed that Merapi was returning to a more usual pattern of behaviour – milder eruptions that were characterised by lava flowing down the flanks of the mountain and easing the pressure inside.
During my breaks from teaching, I would often read the local and national newspapers which had photographs of Merapi. There were often similar, but incredible images of orange lava cascading from a deep central crack in the side of the peak, lighting up the clouds at night. This was exactly the kind of photograph I had hoped to take in Kaliurang. Looking at the captions underneath these photos, I noticed they all had one thing in common – they had all been taken in, or near, a village to the south of the volcano called Cangkringan.
It was too tempting for me, I would have to make the journey to Cangkringan and see if I could finally succeed in photographing the lava.
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Friday 29th / Saturday 30th October, 2010 – Cangkringan
Lightning flashed above the fields of maize and rice, illuminating the palm trees and the leaden, overcast sky. With the taxi window down, the steady pulsating hiss of insects could be heard even above the noise of the engine.
On this trip to Merapi, I had even less idea of where I was going. I had simply asked the driver to take me to Cangkringan and tried to make it understood that I wanted to try to photograph the peak. I had no idea where I would be dropped off, or what I would find when I got there.
Eventually the taxi stopped on a quiet road and the driver gestured for me to get out. As the car pulled away, I switched on my head torch and looked around. The first thing I saw was not very reassuring – a malaria or dengue fever clinic! It was a small, square building with a rather menacing mural of a mosquito on it. Near the clinic was a stone Indonesian-style gateway and beyond that there seemed to be a path leading into a village. If this was Cangkringan – or at least, a village near Cangkringan, then I would need to head due north to have any chance of a view of the mountain. A quick check of my compass confirmed that the little path would take me in roughly the right direction, and I set off.
The path was soon surrounded by small houses. They were simple single-storey affairs with tiled porches and neat yards. It was very quiet and there was nobody around. As I crept along the path I dreaded that a dog would bark and wake the whole village, or worse, attack me. However, I needn’t have worried as it seemed that all of the residents of this anonymous hamlet were fast asleep. At the top of a short rise, the path reached a T-junction. To the left, it dipped down hill, crossed a bridge and beyond that the countryside seemed to open out into paddy fields. That was clearly the direction to go in.
I found myself next to a paddy field that had a small concrete hut in it, just off the path. It seemed the perfect place to make my camp. There was a small pile of vegetation and other rubbish in one corner, so I checked that carefully for snakes before settling in. The hut had very large openings on all sides, so I could easily look all around without moving from my seat on the floor. I set up my telephoto lens on its tripod outside the hut, just in case the sky should clear and give me the view of Merapi that I had come for. The skies remained stubbornly and solidly overcast. There were loud booms and I could not tell if these were thunder, or if they were explosions coming from the killer mountain in the clouds above. I would soon have my answer.
As I sat in my hut, looking out across the dark paddy fields it was very quiet. Occasionally I could hear some very faint music or a radio away to the north. Just like in Kaliurang, I periodically saw green flashes from fireflies as they darted about outside. I managed to catch one of the little insects and found that up close, it was just a dull brown beetle.
I had not been in the hut long, and from memory it was about one o’clock in the morning, when ash began to fall softly from the sky. It was very much like snow as it fell all around. I got up from the hard concrete and went outside. It was then that I did something very stupid indeed – I looked up. A particle of the volcanic ash landed in my eye, and its sharp edges were incredibly irritating. It took me a while to get it out, and even then my eye was sore.
The volcano had obviously erupted, probably around the time I had arrived in the paddy field. Now that the ash was falling, people from the nearby village came out from their houses to have a look. The first was a middle-aged man on a motorbike, who rode right up to the little hut. He was wearing a dust mask over his mouth and nose. Initially I was concerned at what he might say or do. How would he react to finding a foreigner sleeping rough in a paddy field near his house? As it turned out he said nothing. We nodded at one another, and that was all. Before long we were joined by perhaps ten other dust-masked villagers, who also said nothing – either to me or one another. So we all stood in an eerie and rather surreal silence, gazing into the distance to the north. I remember looking enviously at a glass mug of tea that one of the villagers was holding. It had been many hours since I had anything to drink and I was already very thirsty.
One by one my visitors filed away, back to their homes. I sat down again on the concrete floor of the hut, and wrapped my arms around my sides for extra warmth. I found that I was in the exact same position when I woke up hours later, at first light.
Seemingly against all odds, the sky had now cleared and Merapi was visible, albeit wreathed in mist and low cloud. A column of ash was rising from the summit cone, but in the daylight there was no sign of any lava. I considered myself lucky to get any sort of view of the mountain in the rainy season, and took several photos of the smouldering giant on the horizon.
A View of Merapi Erupting, Seen from Cangkringan
Merapi Volcano, viewed from Cangkringan
As I was preparing to leave, I saw a man with a long thin stick approaching through the field. He was guiding a large flock of runner ducks in front of him, that were quacking noisily. We exchanged a nod and a smile as he passed by and then I packed up my camera equipment and walked back through the village. It is amazing the difference that daylight makes. What had seemed like an eerily quiet and strange place the night before was now a charming hamlet with concrete fish ponds, nice neat little houses and lush green trees.
I made my way back to the main road, past the building with the mosquito mural and walked south until I came to a bus stop. I didn’t have to wait long for a bus to arrive and I made the short journey further south to the main Yogyakarta – Solo Road. We stopped across from the famous Hindu temples at Prambanan and from there I took an extremely crowded bus back to Solo. Occasionally I caught a glimpse of Merapi in the distance, billowing smoke and ash.
I was disappointed that I hadn’t seen or photographed the lava, but it had been an amazing experience to spend the night in that paddy field and experience the eruption.
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Shortly after I had arrived in Solo in January of that year, I had joined the Solo Expats Association (SEA). The SEA was often involved in charity work and with the death toll from the eruption rising, it was strongly felt that we should organise some help for the people living on the slopes of the volcano. We came to the view that with the army helping the most badly affected villagers on the southern flank of the volcano, we should concentrate our efforts on helping the people in the village of Selo to the north, who were perhaps a bit neglected at that point. The SEA also had a connection to Selo – a previous member of the SEA had left the association a house in Selo when she left Indonesia. It was sometimes used for weekends away and barbecues, but now it would become a makeshift aid distribution centre.
Sadly, I wasn’t able to go up to Selo on the first weekend aid run. I had promised to take my girlfriend up to the hill resort at Tawangmangu for a day out. By the time of the next aid run, on November 13th, I was eager to get involved.
We all met up early in the morning at Manir’s Happy Restaurant in the Manahan area of Solo – one of the regular haunts for us expats. Manir is a kind and softly-spoken Bangladeshi, and well known for his excellent chicken dopiazas. The scene that morning was fairly chaotic, as large piles of food, bags of rice, cooking oil, ready-to-eat meals, water and packs of nappies (diapers) were loaded into pick up trucks for the journey to the SEA house in Selo. I was looking forward to the drive because I had not yet been out of Solo in that direction.
We set off in a small convoy and made our way out past the airport and through the town of Boyolali – a place famed for dairy farms. As we climbed up towards the town of Selo, we began to see army vehicles parked at the side of the road, and red signs in Indonesian that said ‘Caution: Natural Disaster’. Soon there was a significant amount of ash coating the road and the countryside – it was obvious that we were getting closer to Selo and Merapi.
Ash from Merapi Coats the Road to Selo, Central Java
At last we entered Selo itself. It was a small town clinging to the flanks of the volcano. It had been blanketed in grey ash which had coated the streets, the roofs of the houses and, more importantly, the crops that the villagers depended on.
Fields and Houses Covered with Ash at Selo, Java
The SEA house was a fairly spacious bungalow with a small garden containing some maize plants and some coffee bushes. It seemed that nobody had been in the large living room for quite a while, and it smelled slightly damp and musty.
We set about unloading the trucks from our convoy and stacking the goods neatly around the living room. In no time at all a steady stream of villagers started to arrive. I had been a bit concerned that there might be a scrabble for the aid and perhaps some pushing, shoving and frayed tempers. In fact, everyone calmly and patiently waited for their turn to pick up what they needed. Apparently the RT (head man) of each neighbourhood was organising who got what. Many of the villagers tucked in to the ready-to-eat meals we had brought with us and the children particularly enjoyed the apples we gave them.
Unloading the Aid at the SEA House, Selo
I was surprised to learn that a reporter from TV One News had come to get some footage of the SEA aid effort, and later in the afternoon he interviewed Anne, a fellow teacher who worked with me at the English school in Solo. In the end we did appear in a report on the national Indonesian news.
The Children Were Very Grateful for the Apples
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The second and final aid run (on December 4th) was very similar to the first, except this time we went to a small village called Sepi. Once again, this was on the northern flank of Merapi. As our little convoy of flat-bed trucks climbed up the mountain past very steep terraced crop fields, we got a dramatic new sense of the violence of the events that had taken place here. I noticed that several very thick bamboo stems (so thick they would typically be used to make scaffolding for construction work in Solo) had been smashed almost in two. Whether this had happened due to a pyroclastic flow I did not know, but it seemed that flying boulders were a more likely culprit. Whatever had caused it, it was a very sobering sight.
Once we arrived at Sepi, I was amazed by the amount of grey volcanic ash that carpeted everything in view. As I climbed out of our truck, my boot made an impression in the dust that immediately reminded me of the famous photograph of Neil Armstrong’s boot-print on the surface of the moon!
At a house nearby, two children were shovelling ash from the roof of the house into a hessian sack, and then pouring it on to the ground below. They were smiling and laughing despite the gruelling work and the damage that the eruption had done to their house. With their permission, I went inside, and through to the rear of the property where the shear weight of the ash had collapsed the roof, leaving just a bare light bulb dangling above the rubble.
Children at Sepi Clear Ash from Merapi From the Roof of Their House
This Roof Collapsed Due to Volcanic Ash, Sepi Village, Java
We were soon handing out our cargo of vital supplies for the villagers, as well as sweets and lollipops for the children. Everyone was pleased to see us and grateful for the items that we had brought up from Solo, purchased with money that had sometimes come in from around the globe.
Solo Expats Association Giving Aid to the Children at Sepi, Java
As we worked in the cloud and mist, it was a reminder of the tremendous difference in climate up here, which was cool compared to the sweltering plains below. The volcanoes of Java may sometimes be destructive, but their terraced slopes enable the villagers to grow an incredible variety of crops. Not just fruit and vegetables, but also valuable commodities such as tea, coffee and cocoa (chocolate). Eruptions may sometimes bring death and tragedy, but they also provide extremely fertile soils which sustain agriculture and ultimately the population.
We bade farewell to the villagers of Sepi, and headed back to Solo. It seemed odd to me that even though Solo was not far from the volcano, the only sign of any volcanic activity that we had seen in the city was an occasional sprinkling of dust on parked cars. It was hard to believe that such a dramatic and dangerous event had taken place nearby, especially one that had taken so many lives in a very short time.
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Even though I only lived in Indonesia for a year, the Merapi volcano eruption was not the last one I saw. Bromo volcano (which I had visited earlier in the year) also erupted during my stay in Java. Although I did not see the eruption up close, I did get to witness the huge cloud of dust from the volcano as my friends and I drove back from a visit to the Sukamade turtle beach on Christmas Eve.
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To see all of my photographs from the Merapi Eruption of 2010 and the SEA aid operation, please visit my flickr album .
If you would like to read about more of my travels and see more of my photographs, please visit my website at www.rowancastle.com. Thank you.
All words and photographs by Rowan Castle unless stated otherwise. Copyright 2016.
Adventure Travel and Photography 