Mystery Volcano

See it? Yeah, I didn’t either. It’s there on the right. Or so they told me. The whole time we were in Yogjakarta we were within a couple dozen miles of a fairly large volcano. We were also shrouded in a haze of volcanic ash the whole time. Although I caught glimpses of the volcano, and even walked on it, most of the time I didn’t see it. In fact, when I was walking on it I wouldn’t have guessed it was a volcano except for the porous nature of the rock under foot. We couldn’t see far enough to discern the cone.

That haze followed us the whole time everywhere we went. On two occasions we flew in or out of an airport that had to close down regularly because volcanic ash doesn’t go well with airplane engines and the airport was down wind.

Ironically, the ash covering the nearby volcano came from a different volcano.

As to the flags, we saw them everywhere for the whole trip. Indonesia’s national Independence Day took place toward the end of the trip. The whole country put up bunting and those odd, cloth-on-a-pole flags. They showed up mostly outside of businesses, but also in front of houses and often on bridges.