It was 6 years ago when I first came here. I didn’t remember much about that time, except that it gave me the privilege of saying, ‘Oh yes, I’ve been there’ whenever people talked about how beautiful this place was.

Kawah Putih (literal translation: white crater) is located 50 km south of Bandung, but it took us three hours (one way) to get there. We left at around 8 in the morning (my sister even suggested to leave at 7), and just a few minutes after we got there, it started to rain.

It didn’t look as spectacular as those images in Google, because, for one, the sky wasn’t blue. And of course, this place is never empty, which makes me wonder how those people (whose photos were up in Google Images) took long shots without any human being in the pictures.

But still, it was beautiful.

It was raining harder and the sulfur fumes started to rise up, so we decided to go back. Great timing, because as we were leaving, the place is getting crowded.

We spent another 3 hours going back to Bandung, and later that day, 5 hours going back to Jakarta. That’s around 11 hours in the car, in a day.

After that, my boyfriend swore he wouldn’t be riding a car for at least a few months once he got back home.