Once upon a time in Indonesia [en]

Today I’m on my way to my yearly surf-trip. This year it’s gonna be Indonesia. My third trip to the country.

I might share some impressions later. But right now, I want to revisit my first trip to Indonesia. That was more than 20 years ago, back in 2003. It was my first big journey without my parents. We were a group of 6 friends, all students with loads of spare time and energy, but little money.

We spent most of our time on the island of Lombok. At the beaches in the south, on the Gilis, and on Mount Rinjani.

South Lombok

Here’s some pics from the area around Kuta Lombok:

Notably, the last few pics are from Gerupuk (a quiet fishing village back then) and the nearby surf spots.

Gunung Rinjani

“Gunung” stands for “mountain” in Bahasa Indonesia. And Rinjani is quite an impressive one. We only spent 3 days on our trek:

  1. Up to the northern crater rim.
  2. Down into the crater, to lake Segare Anak and the hot springs, then up to the eastern crater rim.
  3. Night ascent reaching Rinjani’s summit around sunrise, then all the way down towards civilization.

But those 3 days offered very diverse views, so I took more photos than on the rest of the trip. Here are some of them, in roughly chronological order:

And the rest?

After Rinjani, we headed to “the gilies”. Unfortunately, that’s when my camera stopped working. So no more material from that part of our trip.

Looking back at all of my photos (not just the selection above) I realize how few pictures I was taking. Where today I’d try 5 or 10 variations of a shot, I only had done one or two back then. And I remember the reason, too. I had to contend with a 512 MB (!) compact flash memory card. For the whole trip. No other devices to shuffle around data. Needless to say, that memory card didn’t go into a smart-phone, but into a good old-fashioned digital compact camera. Those were the days;)