As if the summit of volcano Merapi wasn’t enough, this time our man went to Tambora. When it erupted in 1815, that rascal plunged our world into Year Without Summer. And no, an extra jacket did not suffice.
Tambora awakens
April 5, 1815, seems like an ordinary day on Sumbawa, one of roughly 17.000 islands that now make up Indonesia. The raja of kingdom Sanggar has eaten well – considering the local culinary preferences, probably nasi goreng – and his servants are busy clearing up when a thunderous bang shakes up the palace. The raja curses under his breath. He fears that the guards posted all over the beaches of his kingdom have fallen asleep and villains gratefully used that lapse in concentration to enter the land and fire a canon. Pirates of the Sulu islands have been beleaguering Sanggar for a while. They target coastal villages to hijack slaves.
One look out of the window tells the raja another truth. Volcano Tambora has awakened from a thousand-year-long dog-sleep and vomits flames towards the sky. The firmament lights up like a funfair, the earth shakes and the noise hurts the raja’s ears. But peace quickly returns and he decides not to worry. Why would he? Sanggar flourishes after seafaring Dutchmen have saved it from harassment of neighbouring kingdoms and subsequently left it in peace. The raja can do whatever the hell he wants. The forests provide sandalwood which merchants sell to shipbuilders; the fertile land is perfect for rice-growing. There are worse places to be raja than this remote corner of Sumbawa. Little does he know that the rumbling of the volcano is just a prelude to natural violence that will not only trigger the fall of his kingdom, but also plunge the world into a crisis without rival.
Five days later, April 10, Tambora goes ballistic. It starts with bangs, so loud that the sultan of Yogyakarta – 1000 kilometres to the west – sends out soldiers to see which enemy is attacking him. Military ships start looking for imaginary pirates all over the region and people in Borneo think that the sky is about to fall on their heads. Tambora spits fire and catapults down pumice stones up to 20 centimetres in diameter.
Then come the pyroclastic flows. A whirlwind uproots trees and launches them like burning spears, it blows away houses and lifts people and livestock like they’re pieces of Lego. All that rage, fire and fury causes a tsunami that drags coastal huts into she sea and destroys rice paddies. As a dessert, the volcano collapses. Of the 4300 metre-high mountain, 2800 metre remains. A third of the whopper is simply blown-up: Tambora has literally been beheaded. After three hours of noise, a grey mist of ash envelops the area in complete darkness. The sky will be pitch-black for three days. The end of the volcanic version of the ten plagues of Egypt? Nope. When the sky finally clears, the misery only starts for the survivors. But more about that soon.
Pope Syndrome
We can now officially confirm that it does not hurt to be batshit crazy because we’re going to climb this destructive fellow. Tambora welcomes few visitors. Whilst you can sometimes imagine yourself on Glastonbury Festival whilst clambering up the flanks of Merapi and other famous volcanoes of the archipelago, Tambora only attracts volcanologists, archaeologists and the occasional hiker. Not a surprise: Sumbawa is the ascetic neighbour of Bali and Lombok, places where you stumble upon a drunk Australian on every street corner. The island is less developed, poorer and more religious. In other words: on first sight, a place where you’d less enthusiastically spend time than in Harvey Weinstein’s bedroom.
Time seems to go slower in Sumbawa. This is already evident at the airport of the regional capital, Bima. In Europa or the USA, an oversized tube of toothpaste in your carry-on luggage would be enough to be tackled to the floor by a gorilla in a tailor-made suit and to be dragged to a back room for a rectal body search. Not here. It would not surprise us that a terrorist walks in here with a mind at easy and a bomb belt ostentatiously girded around the loins and is greeted with a smile. Charming, nevertheless. And there’s not much to blow up anyway.
The two lost surfers at the airport are the last white faces we will see for a while. Not that we feel lonely in Bima. Thanks to the Pope Syndrome. As a whitey, a bule, you can’t take two steps in Indonesia without being chased by a herd of groupies who all want a picture. If you’re not an Instagram whore yourself, posting a selfie every three minutes, that can get very annoying. But it has the pleasant side effect that you rarely have to splash the cash for a hotel room in the less touristy backwaters of the country. There is always a curious local who lets you sleep in his house, at least if you’re willing to shake hands with the whole family first.
Our Bima benefactor is called Rian, a 30-year-old unemployed geologist who lives at home and fills his days nights with endless games of Call of Duty in a coffee bar. “Not that I don’t want to get my hands dirty”, he says firmly. “But there is no work for geologists on Sumbawa. Not for anyone, really.”
When we ask why he doesn’t seek his fortune elsewhere in this almost limitless country, we seem to touch upon a sensitive topic. Rian sighs. “I’ve tried. But my family is religious and the oldest son is holy in Islam. My parents simply can’t stand to miss me. Even when I lived in Yogyakarta for three months, to complete a study, they begged me to return home.” And Rian obeys, even when all his girlfriends run off because of his spineless submission. Our host appears to be an out-and-out mother’s child. Every night, just before the evening prayer, he gets a phone call from Mommy asking where, in the name of Allah, he is. And every time he returns crawling back home.
Time to cheer Rian up. To the coffee bar! There’s no Call of Duty marathon this time, but an open mic evening where everyone who feels called can sing. Especially out-of-tune Indonesians, it turns out, who brutalise pop songs in such a rough manner that even the officers of Abu Ghraib would start to blush in shame. When the organiser sees our white face, the Pope Syndrome kicks in again. He pushes the microphone into our fists. Not to sing – phew! – but for a speech. An interpreter has been summoned in all haste. We don’t know how freely he interprets our words (“God, Bima doesn’t look too bad, at least if I’d have grown up on a farm”), but we receive a standing ovation that night. So that’s how Leonardo DiCaprio must feel.
Bodies on the beach
When we mentioned that Tambora does not attract many people, we forgot another reason: it’s a true labour of Sisyphus to get to the foot of the mountain. And you have to be a zen Buddhist on valium to not let the public transportation drive you to the bughouse. Only after every resident of Bima has put a bag of rice, two chickens, a love letters and, we suspect, a package of drugs on the bus, we finally leave.
No reason to happily dance the hornpipe, because the bus will make a 30-minute detour to deliver the rice to a granny who has difficulties walking. So much solidarity for the fellow human being is nice, but right now we mainly want to hurt people. Bus drivers in particular. The above procedure will be repeated in every village (i.e. group of two houses) that we pass. Fortunately, Sumbawa is less densely populated than Java, where Indonesians are piled up by the dozen, or you could have read this report on the day that pigs fly.
Not that we have much to complain about when we think about the scenes that took place here in 1815. As if it wasn’t enough that flames, gale winds and waves consumed 10.000 of the population, there’s nothing left to eat for the survivors to eat. The vegetation has gone to the dogs, just like the much-needed rice harvest. Their houses have been destroyed and they can only eat dry leaves and – much to their own horror – the meat of their beloved four-legged friend, the Sumbawa pony.
Hunger isn’t the only serial killer. The drinking water is mixed with ash. Everyone who drinks it will soon have to deal with acute attacks of violent diarrhoea. Corpses are composting on the streets. By the time the worst crisis is over, half of Sumbawa is dead. A large part of the survivors flees to neighbouring islands. Not that they’re finding a garden of Eden there. Half a metre of ash falls down on Bali. Some Balinese sell their children for a handful of rice, others rather kill them because they don’t want to see how they die slowly of starvation. The beaches of Bali, nowadays valued honeymoon destinations, are strewn with children corpses.
And the raja? He escapes miraculously by taking the best horses from the royal stable and quite literally outrunning the sea of fire. “Keeping to the narrow route between Koteh and Dompu — the sole band of the peninsula spared from lava inundation — their unimaginable flight involved five-metre-high molten rivers spitting and smoking on either side, their escape like a latter-day miracle of the Red Sea”, writes Gillen D’Arcy Wood in Tambora: the eruption that changed the world. Despite his royal privileges, the raja can’t avoid his daughter succumbing to diarrhoea.
Pompeii of the east
The Tambora misery has also descended on us. We feel weak. Maybe it’s our own fault, for staying too long in the coffee bar, looking at the local beauties. Rian had just in time whispered in our ears that it wouldn’t be worth it. “You’ll have to court and escort Muslim girls for months before you can just hold hands. And you’ll only get near a bed when they see a ring.” His words came too late, sleep deprivation unavoidable. Taking a nap on the bus? Ha! We have to bend our knees in our neck just to fit on our seat. We should have taken that yoga course. On top of that, our stomach growls louder than Tambora in 1815, a result of yet another sambal overdose. Even the Notorious B.I.G. would be better prepared to climb this volcano.
Because it’s silly to give up before you start, we begin the climb the next day. Also because Tambora doesn’t look as menacing as the stories suggest. The mountain doesn’t even look like a raging volcano, rather like the shell of a gentle turtle, the result of the force with which Tambora blasted its top off in 1815. The jungle is lush and we scramble over colossal fallen tree trunks. The volcanic ash has made these slopes more fertile than the average Belgian king.
Like everywhere in Indonesia, beauty and destruction go hand in hand. In 1972, a logging company receives a permit to chop 25 per cent of the woods. Although we can thank the lumberjacks for uncovering the lost kingdom of Tambora. Under a thin layer of humus and a metre of volcanic rock, they find ceramic shards and burnt human bones in 1980. When they take them to the local villagers, they dig up more bronze bowls, jewels and antique Dutch coins.
The findings fuel rumours of a Pompeii of the east and in 2006 an archaeological team finds remains of the village silenced by the volcano: a house buried under metres of pumice and ash, containing the charred bodies of a couple. The woman was working with the knife in the kitchen, which proves once again that we can still learn a lot from ancient cultures. The eruption, however, wiped out the entire society.
Guide Iwan is not convinced. “Many villagers believe that the Tambora people still reside on these slopes”, he says. “They regularly see shadows when they hunt at night. I’m not at ease myself.”
“Yeah, yeah, you also believe that there’s a ghost in the house whenever a gecko croaks seven times”, we say. “And if you’ll excuse me now, nature is calling.” Indeterminate jungle noises still come from our belly. When we want to run into the forest for an urgent toilet break, Iwan grabs us by the collar. “Be careful”, he preaches seriously, pointing into the forest.
“Sure, if I see a Tambora ghost, I’ll tell him you said hi, buddy.”
But then we see what Iwan is referring to: a three-metre long python skin is rotting away between the fallen leaves.
“This one won’t harm you”, laughs Iwan, “but the living ones don’t really appreciate it when you disturb their sleep.”
Forest shagging
His recounting of the roaming Tambora inhabitants has put Iwan into a storytelling mood. “The ghost of the king of Tambora is still wandering these forests, an evil villain who was addicted to spells. Before the eruption, he ruled the empire from a golden palace. Now he makes life difficult for intruders.” Iwan looks at us with mischievous eyes. “You’re lucky you didn’t bring a girl. Anyone who dares to shag on the mountain, will not return alive.”
Not that we attach too much attention to the ever far-fetched Indonesian superstition, but perhaps it is good that all these Bima girls showcased bigot characteristics. You never know. “Mind you,” continues Iwan, “at first, the king seems to want the best for you. He even offers you his daughter. She leads you so far into the jungle that you can no longer find your way back. Many young men have been lost like that.” No wonder with these hard-to-get local girls.
We can’t sleep that night in our tent. Do we hear rumbling? Is it a thunderstorm, a trap of the king, or the roar of an awakening Tambora? The volcano may be asleep, it is not dead. Seismographs measured increased activity as recently as 2011. Or is it our stomach? Anyway, we have seldom been so happy to awaken by a rowdy Indonesian at 1 am. In our rush to the top, we walk over treeless ridges and see some fires in the distance. “No worry”, murmurs Iwan. “They’re not Tambora spirits, but hunters from the plains. It is full of wild boars here.”
After some dabbling through black volcanic sand, we are suddenly on the summit of Tambora. We overlook a volcano crater six kilometres in diameter. Steep walls guide our eyes to a turquoise lake a kilometre deeper. Every few seconds, debris collapses from the crater walls into the deep hole. To think that lava was simmering here just a geological instant ago.
Year Without Summer
The view is worthy of a postcard. It’s hard to believe that this volcano is one of the most destructive from recorded history. In 1815, consequences don’t remain local. The eruption blows 160 cubic kilometres of ash into the air. By comparison, the Icelandic tongue breaker Eyjafjallajökull needed only – coochie-coo – 0,25 cubic kilometres to disrupt global air traffic in 2010. the ash plume of Tambora reaches 43 kilometres high and winds disperse the particles around the earth. This has an impact on the climate throughout the northern hemisphere: the sun simply can not manage to pierce through the dust fan.
Not that anyone makes the connection. News still travels at the speed of a boat and science will only link volcanoes to climate at the end of the century. Either way, 1816 goes into the books as the Year Without Summer. And no, it’s not just the occasional visit to the beach that gets lost. The 1810s are the coldest since forever. Which is saying something, because the period before 1800 is known as the Little Ice Age. Result: living in post-Tambora years is synonymous with hunger almost everywhere in the world.
For once, farmers complain with good reason. Too cold, too dry, too wet: the problems are numerous. Western European farmers leave the crops on the fields for as long as they dare, praying to all the gods for a glimmer of late summer. Alas! In October, the potatoes rot away on the fields. Oats and barley lie under a blanket of snow well into the following spring. In Ireland, ducks swim across the fields after it the rains continue for eight weeks straight. Draft horses, completely exhausted, drop dead in their harnesses.
The price of bread and potatoes explodes. Walking skeletons sneak around the countryside in search for a forgotten semi-rotten potato. Slaughterhouse waste is suddenly a delicacy that must be devoured with eagerness, even if you have to fight a street dog over it. Riots break out on the squares of cities, where disaffected hungry people set bakeries on fire and start pillaging. A recipe for nasty diseases? Yes. Typhus emerges in Ireland and around the Mediterranean.
If that’s not bad enough, the Italian Nostradamus has predicted the end of the world. On July 18, 1816, a piece of the sun will crash on the earth. Panic! In Belgium, churches fill with believers muttering Hail Mary’s. One stormy evening, three-quarters of the inhabitants of Ghent rush onto the streets. They’ve mistakenly confused the martial music of a passing regiment for a trumpet announcing Judgement Day.
The Year Without Summer isn’t just a European affair. The east coast of North America is in the grip of the cold front all summer. It freezes in New York and people use sledges in Virginia. Rural Vermonters survive on hedgehogs and boiled nettles. Thousands of settles will eventually leave the coast and look inland for a more hospitable climate. Hungry Chinese suck on white clay and soil, and in India, disturbed monsoons lead to famine and cholera.
Conclusion: the worst famine of the 19th century. All because a volcano on an island that no one had ever heard of wanted to rise up.
***
The original version first appeared in the now-defunct Flemish weekly P-magazine. This post has been translated and edited for clarity.
Gunnung Bagging has all the information you need on climbing the volcanoes of Indonesia, including Gunung Tambora.