Some quick notes on my recent trip to climb Mt. Rinjani in Lombok, Indonesia.

• My wife reached the actual summit. I didn’t. Our guide said that I was about 30 minutes away but judging from my slow progress it should be more like an hour. I was too exhausted, didn’t sleep at all the previous night and of course going up further would just mean more distance to go down, so I gave up. It wasn’t personally important for me to reach the summit anyway.

• We were seriously under-trained for the climb, a fact made especially evident by how our porters and our guide helped us carry stuff while everyone else had to carry their own gear. I’ve done this sort of multi-day camping trip before and also underestimated how exhausting a multiple day trek would be, combined with how hard it to rest at a camp with no creature comforts whatsoever.
• As expected the scenery is indeed spectacular. Not quite as otherworldly as Mount Kinabalu, but the view of the mysterious volcano in the middle of a lake, ringed by the tall walls of the crater rim looks very impressive. Our trek, while very strenuous, also took us along some very interesting paths.

• In fact, the place seems to have a wealth of natural beauty. On the last day of our camping trip, we stayed at a local waterfall. It turned out to be a two-level waterfall with water falling from a very impressive height indeed. I don’t know much about waterfalls in Malaysia, but my wife mentioned that it seems to beat anything in Peninsular Malaysia at least.
• The downside is that, up close, everything is very dirty. There aren’t huge piles of rubbish or anything like that, but there are bits and pieces of trash almost everywhere you look, the detritus of countless other travellers and their camp sites. It’s especially bad at the popular camp areas and scenic points, so much so that the view is impressive, you don’t feel like staying there for very long. Sadly, this seems to be generally true for the whole island of Lombok.
• There’s also next to nothing in terms of infrastructure supporting tourists. The roads are narrow and rough. There are no official camp sites or designated areas. It seems to be very much a free for all. The waterfall area I mentioned is close enough to the town of Senaru to be a public park, but the toilets are broken down and filthy.

• We had three porters and one guide for the two of us. After some questioning, we found that they are indeed extremely poor and we ended up giving them rather generous tips, by their standards. I was sorry that we didn’t bring more local currency to tip them more. The amount of physical work that they do is gruelling and the pay they receive in return is meagre. In addition to our tent, bedrolls, sleeping bags, and even pillows, they also had to carry all of our food and water, in addition to their own needs of course.

Overall, I can’t say that I enjoyed the trip. The trek was just too strenuous and physically difficult for me. I think it isn’t sufficient to just be fit enough to complete the trek. You need to be fit enough to trek and still have enough energy left over to actually enjoy the view. Sleeping in a tent with no water to bathe or even brush your teeth also wore me down. And of course, climbing the loose volcanic rocks that sinks every time you step on them is no fun at all.

I also think that it is a great shame that Lombok is a place of very impressive natural beauty but the general filthiness makes it very hard to develop tourism of any respectable scale. The volcano so dominates the entire island that it’s hard to imagine it developing any industry other tourism.