"Now it is a strange thing, but things that are good to have and days that are good to spend are soon told about, and not much to listen to; while things are uncomfortable, palpitating, and even gruesome, may make a good tale, and take a deal of telling, anyway."
“O!” said Bilbo, and just at that moment he felt more tired than he ever remembered feeling before. He was thinking once again of his comfortable chair before the fire in his favorite sitting-room in his hobbit-hole, and of the kettle singing. Not for the last time!”
I’m currently reading The Hobbit for the first time and these two quotes, both from the Hobbit, popped into my head multiple times on this hike, specifically on day 2.
Mount Rinjani Trek
Before Hayden and I started dating, I gifted him the Atlas of Adventure from Lonely Planet. In that book he learned about Mount Rinjani—the second highest volcano in Indonesia, sitting at 12,224ft. Inside the volcano is Segara Anak Caldera, a crescent shaped crater lake with Mount Barujari, a smaller active volcano, sitting inside of that. Essentially, a baby active volcano sitting inside a caldera lake on top of a second, larger volcano. Of course upon seeing that picture, he has been dying to hike it ever since. So that’s exactly what we set out to do.
To hike Mount Rinjani, you must go with a guide and there are several routes that you can take. You’re able to reach it on a 2 day, 1 night hike, but we opted for the 3 day, 2 night hike instead. We met with our group, which consisted of an Australian couple and a guy from New Zealand who was only joining our group for the first day and summit push, our 2 guides, and 5 porters. After a briefing of our route, we set off for the mountain. Outside of the heat, day 1 was fairly easy. We hiked for 6 or 7 hours up to the crater rim of the volcano, where we camped for the night. Our camp was at 8,530ft and there were lots of monkeys, which we called HAMs (High Altitude Monkeys). They, like most monkeys, were up to no good.
HAM along the trail
We went into our tent for bed around 7pm since we had an early wake-up call at 1:30am for the summit push. The wind was starting to give cause for concern—our team had strategically set our tents up just below the ridge line to block us from the wind and we could hear it howling on the volcano above. Before we went to bed, our guide stopped by our tent to let us know that the wind was becoming a bigger issue and that because of it, we’d have to add on an additional 1.5h of hiking the next day, potentially finishing in the dark. We agreed because we didn’t really have a choice and the additional hiking time would be downhill, which sounded easy.
Campsites along the volcano crater rim
The next morning we woke up at 1:30am, ate a quick breakfast, and then set off to attempt to summit Rinjani. The summit is broken down into three sections: 1. Very hard 2. Medium hard 3. Extremely hard, with the volcanic rock and sand being so deep that you take 3 steps forward, 1 step back. Hayden and I made it fairly easily through sections 1 and 2, losing the rest of the group who were taking a bit longer to hike. When we got to section 3, the wind was really picking up with the trail also becoming more exposed. We talked with our guide and agreed to keep going until it got too dangerous, but as we set off, we noticed that all the little bobbing headlight lamps in the distance were coming down the mountain, not going up. That’s when things got a bit chaotic and confusing.
As we were hiking up, our guide grabbed my arm to let me know that we were turning around because the wind was making the summit too dangerous. I dutifully followed until eventually I looked up and realized that I didn’t see Hayden and that the man who told me to go down wasn’t our guide. Now having lost both my husband and our guide, I stood a bit confused on the windy and dark trail for a few minutes while quite literally every other person was heading back down around me. Then Hayden ran down the trail to tell me that he was still going to go up. At this point, they were not letting anyone attempt to summit because it was deemed too dangerous and our guide was a bit distraught on whether or not to actually let Hayden go up by himself. After Hayden showed him a picture of him hitting a road gap on his mountain bike, the guide said “Redbull!” and agreed to let him go up, but not before a dramatic handoff of Oreos “just in case.”
Meanwhile, I decided to stay at the beginning of Stage 3, waiting behind a rock in an attempt to block the wind and stay warm while waiting for the sun to rise. The wind was brutal and it was freezing, but once the sun rose the view was absolutely beautiful! Though I will say, Hayden’s viewpoint from the summit was of course more beautiful and features a very cool shadow from the volcano!
Sunrise from my stopping point
Hayden’s sunrise view from the very top
After the sunrise, I made my way back down to go warm up in our tent before we had to continue on for the rest of the day. We originally thought that Hayden was the only person who summited that morning, but we learned that overall there were 7 of them who made it up to the top among the 300+ who set out that morning. The main group who made it consisted of an extremely fit group of 20-somethings from Canada, Switzerland, and Austria, led by their guide who holds the record for the second-fastest summit of Rinjani.
Once everyone made it back to camp, we had second breakfast, said goodbye to our Kiwi friend, and then set off for the remainder of our day, which turned out to be quite terrible. This day consisted of the summit push, the climb back down the summit to camp, climbing down the crater (very difficult rock scramble), a walk around the lake, back up the other side of the crater (another difficult rock scramble), and then down another 45min on the other side to camp. Overall, we hiked from 2am - 6pm. This day was HARD and Hayden says I “bonked,” which essentially means I ran out of energy and didn’t have enough calories to keep myself going. I was absolutely struggling when we were hiking back up the second side of the crater.
The trails going down and back up the crater were rock scrambles and they were filled with ropes, ladders, and metal rungs that are supposed to help you navigate the rocks, except for the fact that they were all fully broken and falling off. When we finally made it to the top of the second crater rim, we stopped for a cookie break and after shoving 6 cookies in my mouth, I felt like a new person. While our extra 1.5h did get shortened down to just 45m (after our guide saw how much we were struggling), we were absolutely beat by the end of the day. We were so excited to finally see our camp that day, we all collapsed in bed and our lovely guides delivered a snack and dinner to us in our tents.
Snacks delivered to our bed in our tent
The final day of hiking was a fairly easy 6 hours down the mountain on a much easier trail compared to the rock scrambles of the crater. We entered the jungle and were able to spot Black Monkeys! Black Monkeys are different from HAMs. HAMs are grey monkeys and they basically just eat trash and cause chaos. Whereas these Black Monkeys were swinging from tree to tree and acting as we thought monkeys should act in the wild.
It felt oh so good to finish the hike and even better to have a shower when we arrived back at our hostel in Lombok. We rewarded ourselves with Mexican food and margaritas, which was much deserved.
