This past weekend I hiked Mount Lawu, a dormant volcano straddling Central and East Java. I see this mountain every day when I walk to school, and from the first time I saw it, I knew it was something I had to conquer.
One of my first instagrams from site – dreaming of Mt. Lawu!
Along with a handful of Peace Corps friends and a few teachers from my school, we started up the mountain around 9pm. We thought we would hike a few hours until we reached the summit, bunk down along the trail, and rise early to see the sunrise. As the Indonesians say, we were going to santai (relax). As the trail started to rise into steeper and steeper boulder-paved-steps, I quickly realized that there would be little santai-ing.
This picture doesn’t even do the trail justice, but let me tell you it was a good thing we hiked up at night and couldn’t see what was ahead of us.
I have hiked a fair number of mountains, but the two I have hiked in Indonesia have challenged me in ways that the ones back home never have. I don’t quite know how to describe it, but these volcanic masses have a different character altogether.
Views from the ridge-line. Amazing.
One of my PC friends described hiking up Lawu as being on a stair-master for 17 hours with a 2 hour break to rest inside a freezer. And that’s pretty accurate. It was hard, it was challenging, and my little toes – four days later – haven’t fully regained feeling.
At the summit!
But it was amazing, too. Oblivious of the challenge that was about to meet us, I started on the trail full of excitement. I was blissfully naïve. But my excitement wasn’t for naught.
The sun, starting to rise beneath a sliver of moon.
Never have I seen stars like I did that night, stretched across the heavens and clustering along the Milky Way. Never have I gone from tropical rice-fields to frosted, edelweiss strewn ridgelines in only 10 hours. Never have I crouched next to a paraffin flame in the small hours of the morning and listened to stories of Javanese mystics drawn to the mountain by the knowledge and peace that can only be gained by living in such drastic conditions. Never have I been so ready to welcome the warmth of the Sun, rising like a fiery jewel over the expansive eastern horizon, erasing city lights and trembling stars in its path.
Ready to greet the sun!
We are all climbing mountains. We all have struggles and challenges, and we all meet them with varying degrees of excitement and anxiety, knowledge and naïveté. I am often asked, “Di mana lebih enak, di sini atau di sana?” – “Where is life better, Indonesia or America?” Depending on who you ask (and relying on the most broad and flawed stereotypes), Americans are either living it up in luxury or working themselves to death. Indonesians, on the other hand, are either laid back and communally focused or enslaved to poverty and corruption. But anyone who is looking for a “Promise Land” in either country will be disappointed.
Views of other peaks around the summit.
The truth is, we all have mountains to climb and challenges to overcome in our lives, but our mountains are each different. Just as I can’t describe what exactly makes mountains in Indonesia different from mountains in the Appalachians or the Adirondacks, it can be hard to pinpoint what makes one person’s struggles – individual, familial, communal, cultural, or national – different from another’s.
Living in Indonesia is teaching me, little by little – bouldery step by bouldery step – that we have to approach each other as fellow climbers on different mountains. We are all trying to go somewhere and do something, but those somewheres and somethings are inextricably fused with our personal, cultural, and national histories. As much as I want everything in Indonesia, or in any country or any person, to make sense to me in my American, white, female, 20-something mindset, sometimes I have to be ready to accept that something about the character of the challenge, the terrain of the mountain, is simply different. It’s a trail my feet have not been trained to tread.
And yet: I have the privilege to step into something new – to see new stars, to reach new peaks, and to feel new sensations. It’s a privilege we all can have, whether half-way around the world or half-way across the office. Ask people about their lives; tell them about yours, climb together. We have all heard, “Walk a mile in someone else’s shoes.” In light of my recent hiking adventures, I suggest we all walk a mile on someone else’s trails.
We may all be climbing different mountains, but at the end of the day we all have burning quadriceps, beating hearts, and waiting goals – somewhere out there in the distance. And just maybe, when we reach a summit, we will look out from our peaks and see one another in the distance, far but close, different but utterly recognizable. And if we are really lucky, maybe we will all bask in the same sunrise.
Worth a Journey 