Here I am posing for the camera in the pool.
Pool parties are great - everyone just gets wet.
Here’s Aaron helping me on the bubble slide on the grass.
Ben’s bouncing on his bum.
And Aaron whizzes past sliding off the end.
Phew - that was hard work - time for tea…
and cake…
It’s GREEEEAAAAATTTTT being 9 !!
This was our first look at Mount Merapi - you can vaguely see her peaking out behind the clouds in the distance (top left). She is just about to erupt - so the volcanologists say and we are sent down just in case.
As soon as we landed we got in the minibus and headed up for a closer look to do a live as soon as possible. Its hard to tell how far away you are because she is 2000m tall and rises out of nothing so its hard to judge. I have some GPS co-ordinates though and will plot them so I can see how close to the crater we did get.
When we arrived at the airport there was an guy offering helicopter rides around the volcano. The next day we met him at 4.30am and drove for an hour out of town to the helicopter - which turned out to be a working Police one. Obviously a few backhanders were flying but when in need! The pictures we got were amazing as it was a beautiful morning.
At the top you can see the ‘dome’ - black and looks like a muffin top. This was growing at some huge amount every day - 500,000 meters cubed and the volcanologists were worried that it would break and spill down the mountain sides.
A closer view..
Whilst taking in this stunning view, we did get round to doing some work as well.
After our aerial viewing, we drove back and went to the closest observation post manned 24 hours a day 365 days a year by volcanologists.
It may look like we had an easy time of it but the days were very long - up at the crack of dawn to get lava shots. Where we waited…
And waited and generally just got covered in ash.. You could see lava flows coming down the mountain but they were quite tiny and not very dramatic. Later we found out those ‘little’ flows had gone 3km from the summit!
Then to see families who were still living under the shadow - less that 5 miles away who still tended to their crops and animals. Here is one family sorting out their corn - ready to sell at market.
As they have lived with this they seemed unfased by it all and hoped that they could get out fast enough if something did happen.
There were those who had moved to temporary camps - tented villages where they were well looked after. Usually in school grounds.
Every now and again Merapi would show signs of activity by blowing out ‘woolly sheep’ - hot clouds of gas that travelled up to ten miles from the crater. The real name for these are the pyroclastic flow which travel at up to 150mph and temeratures can reach between 200C to 700C inside.
On the first day when we set up for the live, we were very lucky to meet Budhi who then spent the rest of the week acting as our translator and fixer.
Here he is during some down time - watching the volcano.
There is an early warning system used to alert people to subsurface activity. Basically you tune a radio receiver into a specific frequency - when all is clear a constant tone is heard, whenever there is activity it warbles - the more the activity the more it warbles. As the mountain spent much of the time in cloud it was very useful.
Every day more people came down to the camps which involved travelling in the back of a truck - packed in like cattle.
Young and old, fat and thin alike.
The day we went up in the helicopter was definately the best. Soon after day break every other day you could hardly see the volcano for mist cloud and rain - which did make it rather challangeng to shoot. We did manage though. Even co-ordinating a live with a break in the clouds.
One day we found another watch tower on the west side of the volcano with a great volcanologist who would actually talk to us and let us know what was going on. Many of the others…. no comment! Pah. It was a good climb up and down.
But the view was terrific.
Stunning views of Mount Merapi just after dawn.
Having been in Yogyakarta for a week and Merapi’s activity calming down we get a clear from London and plan to head home the next day tired and weary after a week of 18 hour days. We settle down for a farewell dinner - ‘Gotta go to Pakistan straight away.’ Best laid plans and all that malarki.
