Mount Bromo is a smoking volcanic crater standing in a plain of grey ash in East Java, Indonesia, and the classic way to see it is from a ridge above, in the dark, waiting for the dawn to bring it out of the mist. It is a volcano inside a volcano. The ash plain, the Sea of Sand, is the floor of a far older mountain that collapsed into itself, and Bromo and its neighbours are younger cones that grew up inside that basin; beside it stands Batok, a perfect ridged cone that no longer erupts, and behind them both, far higher, Semeru, the tallest mountain on Java, which puffs ash into the sky every twenty minutes or so. On the Penanjakan ridge you reach the viewpoint with hours to spare and the caldera below is invisible. Then the light comes, the cones surface out of a sea of white mist, and for a few minutes the whole caldera is gold, with Semeru's plume rising behind. It happens most clearly on calm dry-season mornings; from November to April cloud often hides it.
After sunrise the day goes down into the plain. Jeeps cross the Sea of Sand to the foot of Bromo, though it can be walked from the village of Cemoro Lawang on the rim, following faint tracks across the ash toward the two cones. A staircase up Bromo's flank ends on a crater rim barely a metre wide, with sulphur smoke rising from the throat below and the ash plain spread out behind you. The people of these highlands are the Tenggerese, Hindus on an island that is mostly Muslim, and the volcano is theirs. Once a year, at the festival of Yadnya Kasada, they climb to this rim and throw offerings into the crater, rice, fruit, flowers, chickens and money, while others climb down inside to catch them; the ritual comes from a legend in which a childless couple were granted twenty-five children on the vow that the youngest be given to the volcano. The child was taken, and the mountain has been fed ever since.