Tribute to Planet Earth 🌎 ♥️
- Thread starter bjorb
- Start date
(2.18 min)
XPan
The Living Force
Ooooooohhhh !!!!
That is such a beyond beautiful photo @bjorn - better than anything I have taken (I just admire people who have the eye to take landscape photos like that). The tree, the framing... the feeling, the color nuances in the green. A kind of Rembrandt feeling. Endless beautiful.
It must have been taken from the old "first" trail leading to an observation point near (below) Mount Penanjakan. That trail up is at times rather dangerous, because there is a steep section with very slim, crumbled stairs - with an immediate drop straight down by 150-200 meter. Totally unread to walk on.
I am almost sure that this photo was taken even higher - above the old viewing platform, a bit to the west of it. Oh... many words. But what I really wanted to say... I am so in love with this photo, with this enchanted forest kind of feeling. I remember every single feeling from there.
"The Place where the gods live / are born"
We visited this place in 2010, called the Tengger-Bromo Volcanic Complex (Java, Indonesia) during 11 days. Most people who visit it, stay at best one night, to see the sunrise next morning, and then go home again.
The local calls it "the place where the gods live".
In the foreground you see the extinct BATOK volcano. Just to the left partially covered, you see a 'hollow tooth', which is the famous and active BROMO volcano. And in the background furthest away, you see Java's highest volcano, SEMERU - almost always active.
Little personal story about the Batok Volcano.
When I was in my early teens in Berlin, I saved for many months money in order to finally be able to buy that special volcano book (as it was rare to get anything about volcanoes in the stores). A book describing the volcanoes of the world, their eruptive history etc. I read it probably a hundred times, if not more.
There was this image of a strange looking red-golden-brown glowing mountain (it had no vegetation back in the 70s), with weathered deep "valleys" all around, which looked so... well, like nothing I had ever seen. I couldn't phantom the dimensions of that volcano... it was so "abstract" looking. That image never left my mind.
Never did I think that one day, out of the blue (when I won a Swedish Photo contest) - that ticket would lead into that we would go to Indonesia. And there we stood - in front of that very same Mount Batok Volcano 30 years later. In 2010 it was covered with dry, bush-like pale green vegetation, "Bromo Edelweiss" they call it. But after Bromo's eruptions 6 months later (and many times after), Batok once again looks as barren like in that photo of my childhood.
Tengger-Bromo Caldera
is one of the worlds most enchanted places - It's giant 9 km caldera complex, with a plateau of around 2100 meter height, shows so many different faces - from desert-like barren "sea of sand", to the lush green vegetation on the backside of the complex surrounded by mild flowing gentle green hills (like waves actually) to incredibly steep walls up to 500 meter on the sides, with sharp peaks in which Mount Penanjakan is the highest with 2770 meter.
It's really a place beyond anything I have ever experienced.
