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Back with a bang.. (no, an eruption!)

April 28th, 2006

So I’m back from a break and a fair bit of travel… I’ve been in motion for six weeks now.   The title of this post has two meanings… not only do I have a lava flow of blog posts waiting to spew forth, but Mt. Merapi, the Indonesian hothead, is about to blow its top any day now.  This last happened in 1994, when 60 people died.   What this has to do with me is that I had climbed Merapi just a couple of days prior to that eruption and the guide assured our group that it was quite safe… there were minor eruptions every six hours and the theory was that since the gases were getting released regularly that a big eruption wouldn’t happen.    It sounded good, until two days later I happened to see a newspaper and felt a bit weak at the knees.

This is the photo at dawn that I took back then… the peak is at 10,000 ft. so we were above the clouds and you can see other peaks in the distance. The smoke in the foreground is from the minor eruption that took place as we were looking into the caldera!

More posts coming….

Entry Filed under: Blogging