We set the alarm for 2:30 AM.
Bromo is one of the active volcanos in Indonesia. And sunrise on Bromo and nearby Sumeru has long been on travel blogger bucket lists worldwide.
It was a week night and our guide Toni felt that was sufficient for us to make the sunrise at Mount Bromo. On a weekend we would need to leave the hotel at 2:00 AM or even earlier he said.
As we rolled out of the hotel in inky darkness I understood why. stars glittered above us but below us it looked like Orion’s belt was snaking through the Sea of Sand. “All 4x4s going to see the sunrise,” Toni laughed. “But this is not high season. Last week was worse.”
This is Sandip Roy in Mt Bromo
The 4x4s zigzagged through the sand each trying to nose ahead of the other and then up the mountain. It was barely 3:30 and little shops were open selling tea, coffee and instant noodles. The wind chill up on the mountain can get quite intense. A woman showed up with a bundle of old jackets. We tried to rent a pair, when suddenly we heard a little cry.
JACKETS - 100, there’s a baby. Baby
The woman was carrying her little baby with her, tucked away amidst the pile of used jackets on that cold cold night. Catering to tourists is tough business.
The human fascination with sunrises is intriguing. At home I do not care about sunrises at all. But on vacation there is always a sunrise to catch. When I went for a holiday in Tamil Nadu I woke up to rush to the beach to see the sun rise over the Bay of Bengal. In Laos I watched Buddhist monks walk down the street at sunrise chanting as they accepted alms.
Sunrise and sunset always carried some promise of magic, a moment of daily alchemy. That’s why all mythology has been fascinated by it. The Egyptians believed the sun god Ra fought a giant serpent every night to ensure that the sun rose again the next day. In many mythologies, Norse, Indian, Greek, the sun is a horse-drawn chariot that journeys across the sky. Now we know we are the ones who journey, not the sun. Yet we still continue to say it is the sun that sets and it is the sun that rises. It comforts us to know that come what may the sun will rise. That is how we keep renewing our faith in new beginnings.
Research suggests watching sunrises (and sunsets) come with health benefits because it helps regulate our circadian rhythms and calms our nervous systems. But in these days of social media one suspects the pressure to have the perfect Instagram-worthy sunrise might put actually more stress on the nervous system. Quartz in 2025 listed the cities with most instagrammed sunrises around the world - New York led the list with 685,000 sunrise hashtags. San Francisco, a city I lived in for many years, came in at number 7 with 33,000 tags. I have seen a San Francisco sunrise but only thanks to jet lag, never by design.
Now thanks to Instagram influencers, we can all become sunrise chasers. But more and more our real objective is to create a sense of FOMO in our followers rather than experiencing the magic for ourselves. Sunrise, unlike sunset, happens when much of the world is asleep. It’s a moment of beauty but also of strange aloneness. Sunset feels more communal somehow conjuring up images of people drinking sundowners at the beach.
But as I realised afresh at Bromo, the bucket list sunrise is anything but lonely anymore.
SUNRISE PEOPLE
As the sky lightened and turned pink people, many of them Chinese tourists, lunged for every free corner and spread out their arms in Titanic poses while the photographers shouted .....
PHOTOGRAPHER
Our guide gestured to us to stand near a tree. He knew how to take a picture so that it would seem it was just us, the tree and Mount Sumeru with puffs of volcanic smoke hanging above it. In reality there were hundreds of people around us all striking poses.
On the way down we were stuck in a massive traffic jam. Unsurprisingly I whiled away my time editing my sunrise pictures so that it would seem as if I had enjoyed my own private sunrise.
This is Sandip Roy in Mt Bromo for KALW