foto-stretch with 19 images..

Indonesia steams. In the rainy season small cotton balls form on the horizon in the morning, during the day they pile up to huge white and gray mountains of clouds and in the late afternoon they unload all their moisture in heavy rainfalls. Evapourating moisture is rising and caught between the hills and the air comes to a standstill. Whether it rains or not, the temperature remains constant at hot. Sweat covers our bodies like an adhesive film or runs down on us in little tickling streams. The only thing to be reliefed a little is to remain in absolute immobility. Not a problem for us and so we move only if it is really necessary and even then only in a very slow pace.

Indonesia never stops steaming. Smoking volcanoes line up throughout the archipelago like on a string of pearls. In the early morning, the almost perfectly shaped cones stick out of the haze and ornate columns of smoke rise slowly skywards. Some can be climbed and from the rim of the crater you can see lakes in bizarre colours or boiling steam coming out between cracks of lava stone. They are like oversized pressure cookers - like the Bromo, one of several craters in a huge crater plateau which we want to climb.
At sunrise, before clouds turn everything into grey, we drive to the highest point of the surrounding crater rim to admire the seething Bromo and its quiet buddies. A spectacular play of colours takes place in the sky - as in a painting orange, red, purple, yellow and anthracite flow in circles and stripes together and constantly create new images.
Still intoxicated by the colour play we descend to the crater plateau and walk through gray-white ash to climb the cone of Bromo, watching the thick white cloud coming out relentlessly. Looking into the crater it is hard to imagine which huge forces of nature could become evident here so suddenly. And in this very moment we, as human beings, feel very small.

We take the bus to Bali, past never-ending rice paddies and through misty rain forests. A cloudburst blurres the vision of villages and fields and beats against the windshield of our bus until we reache the ferry, which carries us across to the world famous holiday island. We have a quick glance at white beaches, beautiful temples, bars and cafés and get a quick impression before we continue – in a few weeks Bali will be the end of our trip to Indonesia. Right now we are only attracted to the Gili Islands, three tiny islands, on which we have not much more to do than to lay back and enjoy our  holidays from holidays in paradise. While crossing the sea by boat we keep an eye out for dolphins, but suddenly instead, swarms of little fish jumps out of the water in front of us, fly in a comic-like paddeling movement across the water surface and dig back into the sea after a few meters. Flying fish – they really exist!
Gili Air is the chosen island for our Robinson Crusoe Experience and can be circumnavigated  within a little more than an hour. Time has come to a standstill here – not only for the visitors. We sleep, read, day dream or let our thoughts be carried away with the breeze, or we go snorkeling in between corals, swarms of fish and turtles and feel like beeing thrown into a well-equipped oversized  aquarium.
In the evening we choose from the freshest fish for the BBQ – baracuda, snapper, unicorn fish – or giant squid and prawns. Along with it goes a watermelonen shake or a chilled beer and everything is perfect. With the murmuring sound of the nightly rain that falls on our dense palm leaf roof we call it a day and slumber away. And what are we going to do tomorrow? - Well, nothing!