Multi-Day Tours in Indonesia

Multi-day tours in Indonesia exist because the best hour of the day is four in the morning and the next place is six hours away. Two routes account for nearly all of them. The East Java volcano run pairs Bromo with Ijen: a jeep to the caldera rim before dawn, a long transfer east across the province, then a walk into the Ijen crater around midnight, where escaping sulphur gas burns blue above the largest acidic crater lake on earth. The other route runs inland from Makassar into the Toraja highlands of Sulawesi, where roofs are built in the shape of boats, wealth is counted in buffalo, and the dead stay at home for months until the family can afford a funeral.

In practice these are purchases of logistics. Nothing here is a longer version of a day trip; each one is a chain of drivers, permits, guest houses and start times that holds together only because somebody else is holding it. The Java run is short and hard, two or three days with two broken nights inside them. Toraja is the opposite shape: three or four days out of Makassar, most of the first and last spent on eight hours of mountain road, the middle given to villages, cliff graves and whatever ceremony is happening that week. Both go privately more often than in a group, because the group version needs a group and there is rarely one waiting.

Practical. pack for cold, which catches people out on the equator. The Bromo rim before sunrise sits near five degrees and the Ijen ridge is colder in the wind, so a fleece, a hat and proper shoes outrank everything else in the bag. Guides hand out a gas mask at Ijen and you wear it: the fumes move with the wind and are foul. Both crater walks close when the volcanoes are restless, and that decision is taken on the morning. Toraja funerals cluster in the dry months from July to September, cannot be scheduled to order, and if you attend you wear dark clothes and bring a small gift, traditionally cigarettes or sugar.