Mount Bromo
— — the morning the smoke is the colour of the sand.
Not only on a wall.
“An active volcano inside a wider caldera, ringed by a sea of grey ash that the Tenggerese have farmed and crossed for centuries. Most visitors arrive in the dark and walk the last stretch toward the rim while the sky turns. The cone keeps a thin column of sulphur smoke going on quiet days. Behind it, Semeru releases its own plume every twenty minutes or so. The wind on the caldera floor carries fine ash; people pull scarves over their faces and keep walking. from the studio
Mount Bromo, on ceramic.
Each tile is finished by hand in our Knoxville studio. Artwork is slowly infused into the ceramic surface under high heat and pressure, and rests beneath a thin glossy finish. The colour lives in the surface, not on top of it.
Pick any four 4-inch tiles — National Parks you've been to, a Smokies set, the four seasons of one place. $ for a set of , cork-backed, ready to live on the table.
The place, in three passes.
Mount Bromo sits at 2,329 metres in the Tengger massif of East Java, inside a caldera roughly ten kilometres across known locally as the Sea of Sand. It is one of several cones sharing that floor, with the larger and louder Mount Semeru rising to 3,676 metres on the southern horizon. The whole complex is protected as Bromo Tengger Semeru National Park, established in 1982 and covering about 503 square kilometres. The Tenggerese, a Hindu community descended from the Majapahit era, farm the slopes and tend the rim shrine where the annual Yadnya Kasada offerings are made.
Bromo vents sulphur dioxide continuously, sometimes mildly, sometimes hard enough that the park service closes the rim path. The Indonesian volcanology agency PVMBG keeps it on standing observation; alert levels have stepped between Normal and Waspada several times in the last decade. On the caldera floor the air is dry and abrasive, fine basaltic ash lifting whenever a horse trots past. Tenggerese guides bring scarves for visitors. The smell at the crater lip is something between struck matches and old iron, carried in pulses depending on which way the wind comes off Semeru.
Once a year, on the fourteenth day of the Tenggerese month of Kasada, villagers from the surrounding hamlets climb to the rim and throw offerings of rice, vegetables, livestock and money into the crater. The ritual, Yadnya Kasada, commemorates a legend of the Majapahit princess Roro Anteng and her husband Joko Seger, whose youngest child was promised to the mountain. The festival usually falls in June or July by the Gregorian calendar and draws several thousand people. Some climb down inside the crater walls afterwards with nets, hoping to catch what was thrown.