Homecoming: Sea of Sand

Continuing with our Mountain Trip, while the end was within sight, the mountain is definitely still a bit of a distance away. Can you see it in the newly-annotated picture above? (Annotating the pic sure take a bit of extra effort and time, but it was sure worth it. Do you like my "handwriting"?)
As shown, we still had to go down to the Sea of Sand, cross the aforementioned sea, then climb the Mount Bromo.
As to why we want to climb the mountain... well... not sure. That's just what people do when they come here, so.... You'll get to see the cool, smoking crater, which we will show later, but anyway....

The distance we needed to cross was pretty considerable, you might say, so ... it was back to the trusty 4-wheeler jeep.

Ain't it cool? A proper, old-fashioned, big, red Jeep, complete with its own 'moustache' aka bug shield. This was what we took to go down to the sand.

That was us in the Jeep. Kecil was moving too much so unfortunately there was no clear picture of her in the Jeep.

Now as cool as the Jeep was, it could only take us so far to the Sea of Sand, after which, the rest of journey needed to be taken on foot, or on ponies. Needless to say, we chose the ponies.

These ponies, as the name implied, are no huge, hulking brutes. So there was no question of sharing them, we all had to ride our own ponies, including Kecil. Nothing to fear, though, since the pony handler was with us all the while, leading the ponies.

 Kecil was awesome on the Pony. Why, on the way back from the mountain, she actually let the pony handler left her alone! Mama actually insisted that the guy did not let go of Mama's pony. Mama is a chicken. Ha! But seriously, you should check out the terrain we had to go through!

We passed a Hindu temple along the Sea of Sand, and then there was a rest stop with toilets and people selling snacks and drinks.

Oh, and did I mention that it was quite a good distance of riding? It was, seriously.

See? Up above was the view not long after we got on the ponies ...

And that one above, was the view from the top of the Mount Bromo. The temple was puny whereas the line of Jeeps (trust me, there were at least 10 to 20 Jeeps parking there) and ponies could hardly be seen.
As to where the above picture was taken ... behold below, the Steps to Heaven ...

The ponies actually took us through the hillocks, right up to the bottom of the steps. After that... well.. it's just you and your own feet, up and up through EXTREMELY sandy steps (the mountain spewed some debris not a few weeks before, after all, gaah!)

Ugh, looking at the stairway again was enough to make this Mama feel tired. Perhaps it's time to stop first while Mama collects her breath back. We'll continue in the next post with final pictures of the mountain. Cheers!