22 August 2013

Misty Indonesian sunset

6pm seems incredibly late when one has woken up at 4.30am to see volcanoes at sunrise. In fact, that’s probably why 6pm was the deadline of the “happy hour” (10% discount, yay) of the only decent but overly pricey (booh) restaurant in Tosari, the Indonesian village I was staying in, almost the last one in the mountain with some form of accommodation before the ride up to the volcano area.

6pm was anyway the sunset at this time of the year in Indonesia. What an enjoyment to watch the mist and the clouds rolling up from the valley into the mountain. It reminded me of those beautiful photos – not mine – I had hung up everywhere with bluetack on a wall of my student room when I was nineteen. With a peculiar sense of design, I had filled up the wall completely to the point of leaving no empty space (fair enough, the room was not particularly big): the pictures consisted mostly of hillsides, forests, and mountains, with rays of light piercing through mist. I am now wondering where I put these small photos, probably in one of my cardboard boxes down in the cellar…

Once the sun had disappeared behind the mountain peaks, I was left with Rothko-like stripes of colour in the sky (if you don’t know Rothko, take a quick look at those images). And when the light was almost gone, the scenery evolved to something resembling Chinese prints for their blue-grey curved lines and slightly blurred areas depicting mountains.

Dinner was served. The night had settled in, bright stars piercing through. Sleep would soon follow, before a very long trip that would see me riding down the mountain on my motorbike during a lovely sunny morning, luckily catching a train that was marked as full online, embarking on a non-sinking ferry across to the island of Bali, and later on coming very close to what I thought would be my last moments alive... but that’s, perhaps, for another post.