New Cahaya Hotel, Surabaya

Every ten minutes an aeroplane is flying over our hotel making a horrible noise as if about to crash into the hotel.

This morning woke up at 3 o'clock and was taken by a jeep to the Mount Penanjakan (2,770m) viewing platform to witness the sunrise over the Tengger caldera. There were some 300 other jeeps, each carrying 6 people, so the viewing platform got quite crowded. (According to our driver it's usually not that crowded, but people seem to have holidays now.) The view was otherwise breathtaking just like Wikitravel promised.


Then climbed Mount Bromo again (had done it already yesterday, but then without the mass of tourists, and the horses that carry them up).

Back at Hotel Yoschi, had breakfast and took a 15-seater minibus to Probolinggo. A few minutes into the journey 7 more tourists were stuck into our bus as theirs had broken down. We were now 19 people + the driver. The caller guy had to travel outside the bus hanging onto the door while the bus was speeding downhill towards Probolinggo.

In Probolinggo we immediately hopped on a bus to Surabaya. The traffic was crazy, Csilla was in panic throughout the whole journey. The food vendors and bus musicians were around all the time, but as Surabaya is not that far the torture did not last that long. During the journey it turned out that the bus would make the final stop at the main Surabaya bus station which is far from the city centre but quite close to the airport. So we decided to go straight to the airport and try to get a flight to Sumatra in the same evening.

At the Surabaya bus station switched immediately to an airport bus. At the airport tried to buy a flight to Medan, but today's flights were already sold out.

So will spend the night in a hotel near the airport (under the landing path, it seems) and will fly to Sumatra tomorrow morning. This will be our final planned equator crossing, taking us to the northern hemisphere.