Rinjani Complete 4D3N: the route that camps at the crater lake

We pick you up from your hotel anywhere on Lombok and drive to Sembalun. The walk in is the gentlest part of the whole trip and the part most people underrate. Wide savanna, the mountain in front of you the entire time, herds of cows you walk around. Bring sun cover. There is almost no shade out here, and the heat is heavier than the altitude.

We start walking around 9 in the morning, after registration at the park office, and stop on the trail for a hot lunch cooked by your team, not a sandwich. Then the trail tilts. The climb from the savanna floor up to the Sembalun rim is steep switchbacks for two to three hours, and this is where you stop talking and start counting steps. Your porters reach camp ahead of you, so by the time you reach the rim in the mid-to-late afternoon the tent is up and water is on for tea.

Camp sits at the edge of the crater. From here you can see the summit you will climb in the dark, and the lake you will sleep beside the day after. We eat early. You sleep early. It will be cold at the rim, and the rim-rated sleeping bag in your kit is rated for it. We wake you at two.

We wake you at two. Light breakfast, headlamp on, and we walk out of camp around 2:30 in a slow line. The summit push is the hardest three hours of the trip. The trail is volcanic gravel on a steep slope. One step up, half a step back. Do not race. The people who race quit. Your guide walks your pace, not his.

It is cold up there. Wear everything you brought. The last hour you will wonder if you can do another hour. You can. Sunrise lands somewhere between 5:30 and 6:15 depending on the month. The cloud sea below, the caldera lake on one side, the ocean on the other, and if the light is right the shadow of the mountain falls across the cloud like a triangle. I have walked to the summit several hundred times. It has never once been the same climb.

We come down the same gravel, much faster, back to Sembalun rim camp for a proper breakfast. Then we pack and descend roughly 1,700 m to Segara Anak, and this time you don't pass through. You stay. The porters pitch the tents by the water while you soak in the hot springs in the afternoon, and dinner is cooked beside the lake.

This is the whole reason the 4-day route exists. On the 3-day trip you'd shoulder your pack and grind back out of the caldera the same afternoon, summit-tired. Not here. You stop. The lake is yours for the evening, Baru Jari smoking across the water, and you sleep at 2,000 m with the sound of it close by.

No two o'clock wake-up today. You get up with the lake, coffee in your hands, and the morning is yours. Most people go back to the hot springs while the air is still cold, steam coming off the water, the caldera walls catching the first sun. The sulphur pools run from pleasantly warm to almost too hot, so you test one and pick your spot. There is no schedule pushing you off the water. That is the point of the fourth day.

When you're ready, we climb out. The trail from the lake up to the Senaru rim is rocky uphill, three to three and a half hours of it, and I won't pretend it's nothing. It's the same caldera wall the 3-day trekkers grind up. The difference is you do it rested. Not on summit-day legs, not in the same afternoon. You slept. You soaked. You walk it slower and you finish it standing up.

Camp on the Senaru rim is the third night, the mountain mostly behind you now, the lake below and Baru Jari across it at dusk. Dinner is hot, the walking tomorrow is all downhill, and for the first time on the trip there is nothing to be nervous about in the morning.

Coffee at the rim while it is still cold, then we go down. The Senaru side is rainforest, not savanna. Soon the air is warmer and wetter, the trees close in over the trail, and you start hearing birds you did not hear on the Sembalun side. There are usually monkeys.

The descent is long. Five to six hours, mostly down, and this is the day your knees complain. The loaner trekking poles earn their place today. We stop often, eat fruit, drink water. There is no rush. The mountain is behind you now.

We finish at Senaru village around lunchtime. Cold drink, real toilet, a chance to wash your face. Your driver is waiting. We bring you back to your hotel on Lombok or to Bangsal harbour for the Gili boats, whichever you booked. Most people sleep in the car. That is also normal.