Bromo Sunrise from King Kong Hill, with Coffee While You Wait

This one is built for people who are short of days. One day, private, and the whole Bromo sequence compressed into it: a 4WD on the off-road track, a walk up a volcano, and the sunrise. The sunrise point is King Kong Hill, which looks across at Bromo, Batok and Semeru at once. Coffee or tea is handed round while the light comes up, which matters more than it sounds at that hour and that altitude. Then down the hill and across the sea of sand, the plain of ash the mountain has thrown out over the years. From there it is a thirty-minute walk, easy going, to the lip of the crater, where the noise coming up out of the ground is the part nobody is prepared for. Breakfast is a buffet, served after the walk rather than before it. Bromo is one of the active volcanoes of East Java, and it is treated as sacred by the people who live around it, a thread the guide picks up during the day. Getting there from Surabaya or Malang takes about two hours.