[simage=2248,200,n,left,]Dempo is a hulk of a mountain, and one of the few peaks in Sumatra over 3,000 metres. It dominates the landscape at the southern end of the Bukit Barisan mountains in South Sumatra, an area that’s important for Sumatran tigers. It’s not an easy mountain to get to, requiring a 6 hour drive from Bengkulu or Palembang. We joined the four-day Java Lava trip organised to to coincide with Ascension Day (national holiday) – the Friday also happened to be my birthday and we thought that camping in the meadow below Dempo’s crater at 3,000 m would be a good place to spend it. We were also going to test out our new, fabulous Hilleberg tent.
The journey from Bengkulu to Pagar Alam, the town at the foot of Dempo was straightforward with no sign of the fabled “Bengkulu Highwaymen.” It was dark when we arrived at our accommodation, but the next morning we awoke to clear skies and could see the immense form of Dempo with some wispy cloud on the summit. Dempo’s lower slopes are surrounded by an enormous state-owned tea plantation, which stretches up to 1600 m elevation. The road up the starting point is drivable in a car, but quite rough. With more than 40 hikers and porters, our guides had organised two trucks to take us to the rather uncreatively named “kampung empat” (or village 4).
We had to wait at Kampung Empat for the porters to arrive. When their truck did show up, they were 3 porters short and one look at them inspired us to do a rucsac re-pack to make sure that we were carrying our tent, survival bags, and other stuff to have a reasonably comfortable night if they did not make it to the summit (we had learned our lesson after Tambora). This proved to be a smart move as it took them around 8 hours to get to the camping area! Later on we found out some of them had been commandeered into being porters on their way to school and most had not been to the summit before! The guys that came up with us had to wait until 9 pm for their friends to arrive with food and shelter so we all made a collection of spare food to keep them going.
The hike up Dempo is a bit of a slog – it’s fairly steep with numerous deadfall trees. There are lots of eroded areas where you are pulling yourself up by tree roots. However, the forest is good and there are frequent sounds of monkeys and gibbons. The pos en route have quite a lot of litter, an all too familiar problem on many mountains. When you eventually get to the camping area below the summit, it’s a great place to pitch your tent in a pleasant meadow with a clean spring for water. Unfortunately it was pretty cloudy, and while waiting (hoping) for the porters to arrive, we decided not to risk getting wet during an afternoon climb the summit. We saved that until sunrise the next day, and it is really worth the additional 150 m climb – the crater is large with steep, colorful cliffs and a lake in the bottom. Unfortunately, we could not hang around and had to go back to break camp and hike back down to Pagar Alam. As the summit area is large and interesting, and given that there is a good water supply we think it would be worth camping for two nights to do some more exploring.
The journey back to Bengkulu the same afternoon/evening felt longer and bumpier. But we were rewarded with a night in town’s excellent 4 star hotel complete with copious amounts of birthday beer. Feeling the effects the next morning, we recovered with a good breakfast and then headed to see the historic sites of Bengkulu. These were much more impressive than we expected – Fort Marlborough is a large and quite well preserved fort built by the British, China “town” complete with a Buddhist temple, plus an old British cemetery, and the house where Sukarno was held by the Dutch as he campaigned for independence.
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