Ijen Blue Fire is Actually Not Everything

Since it’s one of those famous attractions in Banyuwangi, Ijen has been one of the crowdest tourism places. Where you will see packed visitors aiming to hike and get close to the blue fire, get framed with this and Voila! What an Achievement!

But what other things else people could expect to do in Mt. Ijen? Instead of going down and getting into the crowds. Here the story from our wanderers that might be the alternatives for everyone who wants to get something different while wandering this volcano.

As usual, we arrived at the parking area at 1 am and took a quick final preparation before we started the hike. It normally takes around 2 hours to approach the peak, and for those who want to continue the trekking down to see the blue flames, another 45mins of trekking down will be waiting for them.

Once we reached the peak or we may call it as the summit, we saw so many people gathered in this area, then we just didn’t stop our journey and kept moving further following the crater rim. Since we arrived here when it was still dark, then it opened a chance to gaze the mesmerizing stars in the sky. It’s the normal view as we are on the high altitude and the clouds are might below us. We just took some time to look up to the sky and felt the majesty of the space.

And the journey was not over, so we didn’t take too long to enjoy the sky, we still had to keep walking, passing the bushes and getting into the branches or dead trees, the path was quite narrow, so we got ourselves safe by turning on the lights and kept watching our step. In less than 30 minutes, we arrived at the area where we could see the ruins of an old bunker. This is the place for everyone to see the best sunrise. We stayed here and got ourselves satisfied for like an hour maximum and then we went back to the same way we were from, to track back the phenomenal view and surroundings that we had missed as they were not seen because of the dark.

The first thing that we saw was the surreal view of the turquoise lake, the main view of this attraction. But along the road, we also finally discovered the beautiful composite of dead trees and also many kinds of typical mountain vegetation. What a place to catch our best shot, or just getting ourselves being content.

We were so drowned at the moment that we really enjoyed exploring this area, got so many pictures and we needed to keep watching the time as we didn’t want to miss our breakfast down there. The clock showed the time at 8 am and we took our step down for less than an hour to the parking area and went straight to the hotel we stayed and had some breakfast.