Tour module 4 days from Bali - Kawah IJen and sea turtles

The car will pick you up after breakfast and drive to the small port town Gilimanuk, in the west of Bali. We cross over to Java with the ferry in about half an hour. From the port it’s another half an hour drive to your hotel. At a surcharge you can also choose to stay in the beautiful Ijen Resort on the flank of the volcano. If so, you will drive one hour more to get there.

You’ve got two options to visit the Kawah IJen: 1. We get up in the middle of the night and make a long walk of about two hours to the top of the Kawah Ijen volcano. Then we go down into the crater, where, even during the night men are working hard to collect the yellow lumps of sulphur in the crater. The sulphur fumes are dominantly present, so wearing a mask or a scarf around your face is not an unnecessary luxury. Once we are in the crater, when it’s still dark and we’re lucky, we’ll see the Blue Flames, a mysterious blue glow which looks like the blue flames of a gas stove.. 2. Early in the morning, before sunrise, we make the tough walk to the edge of the crater. From the edge you have a wonderful view over the crater lake and you see (and smell) the sulphur. You can descend to the place of the sulpur mining and be face to face with the sulphur porters, who carry upto 75 kg sulphur up the steep rocky path from the crater floor to the edge where the sulphur is being weighed. After breakfast we leave the hotel and drive via Banyuwanggi to our next destination, the rural village Kalibaru. A more than two hour drive. NB: On Fridays the sulphur porters have their day off.

After breakfast you drive with a jeep to the National park Meru Betiri. Along the way you can witness life on the rubber, cacao and palm plantations and see how the irrigation constructions built in the last century are still in use. You have lunch in a small fishing village on the bay of Rajekwesi. In the afternoon you arrive in Sukamade, where you stay in the very basic pondok Wisata Baru (no warm water, no shower but a mandi container, with sometimes electricity and sometimes not. Bring some toilet paper from your hotel) You visit de turtle nursery here and most of the time you can put young turtles back into the sea. Around 6 PM you have a simple dinner in the Pondok. Then a half- hour drive with the jeep to the beach. The last kilometre you have to walk through the forest The local guide goes looking for nests on the beach. As soon as he finds one, he’ll come and get you. The turtles laying their eggs here vary from 150 – 350 kg and lay in about two hours 100 – 150 eggs, which hatch after 8 weeks. To be a length ahead of poachers and to increase the survival rate of young turtles the eggs are dug out little time before they hatch and taken to a shed at the Pondok. When the baby turtles hatch they stay some more days to get stronger before putting them back into the sea. The following morning before leaving you’ll visit the plantation village and the rubber factory, NB: Very basic overnight stay!

Today we drive back to Ketapang, a small port place on the coast, from where we cross over to Bali, the island of the thousand gods. With the ferry we cross in about half an hour to Gilimanuk, situated on the coast of northwest Bali. Your driver drives you to your hotel: North Bali: Mimpi or Pemuteran (both at ca an hour and a half drive from the ferry) or Lovina (ca 2 hours). South Bali and Ubud: ca 4-5 hours.