Nick looking at the sardines while the sardines moved away from the bubbles to create an ‘eye’.

A school of yellowtails dwarfed by millions of sardines along the coast of Moalboal as Garry, our guide, looks on.

At about 2000m above sea level, climbers call it a day, camping right at the edge of the crater. Some on their way up to the summit while some on their way down the mountain, very often exchanging words of encouragement.

A lone hiker taking a break while the light from the sun broke into a dance routine with the fast moving clouds.

The lone porter along the crater of the Mount Rinjani. 

Without them, the climb would not even have made it past day 1. They are the miracle workers of Mount Rinjani. Each porter carries up to 30Kg worth of supplies on their shoulders up the mountains, very often reaching the check points way earlier than their city dwelling customers. They zipped up and down the mountain with such speed and ease it made me feel useless. By the time we caught up with them at our resting areas, they would  have already set up our tents, makeshift toilets and halfway through cooking our meals. I can’t help but feel amazed everytime a porter overtakes us (which happens all the time) effortlessly. While I struggle up some of the steeper parts of the trail in fours, they simply stepped up, hands free, in slippers and sometimes barefooted. The equally amazing guides started out as porters when they were younger too.

As we moved up and down the slopes around Mount Rinjani, scenes like that kept appearing around us everytime we looked back. Before the trek, Macho, our guide, told us that he will tell us a method to trek up the summit. During the course of the trek, we all forgot about it and didn’t ask. On our 3rd day down the mountains, I asked him, what was it that he was supposed to tell us. He said, ‘when you trek up, do not look up. Instead, look back.’ The whole idea was so that you look at what you have achieved to motivate yourself rather than look at the path in front, which I agree, did not do anything positive to my morale. It’s always so near yet so far. Simple theory, but so effective.

My alarm woke me up at 130am in the morning. Feeling tired and excited at the same time, I stuck my head out of the tent and saw the milky way on the other side of the sky and lights from head lamps trickling up the slopes beside it. This was it.

Taken right after dinner. I was terribly hungry after the almost 9 hour hike up base camp at 2600m. Muscles that I never knew I had cramped up and legs went jelly. That night, I requested for double the serving of dinner and finished them in half the time. That was when I heard someone outside saying ‘look at the stars!’. I crawled out of my tent and quietly went ‘wow…’.

Taken at pre dawn on my last day on Gili Trawangan. For some reason, I woke up on my own at 5am and decided I should take a walk and perhaps catch the sunrise. When the first light hit the peak of Mount Rinjani, it brought back the days old memories when I was up there, watching the sunrise from the slopes. It was beautiful.

…and this is where I climbed.

Cuts like a knife. But silly me, missed the tip by a little.

The heart of the city – what lies beneath.

This week had been pretty awesome with great dives, great company and life pretty much unplugged. But like all awesome holidays, it comes with some unexpected and ‘memorable’ experiences as well. Got seasick once, puked like mad. Housing flooded twice (thankfully I surfaced before things got really bad and found out the culprit was a faulty dome port). Jellyfish stings (oh, those things are really beautiful… and as with beautiful things, keep a distance). Camera shutter kind of died, so I had to wait about 10-15 seconds between shots for the error message to clear. It’s a real pain but I learned to slow down and pick my shot instead of spraying. On some dives, at depths below 15m, some of the buttons on the camera refused to work for some reason. So it was like shooting manual on film because the playback button and focus button didn’t work. Despite all these, it was still an awesome trip.

For more images of the trip, you can follow me (feldberyl) on instragram.