[Mountain Mafia 720p Torrent
Saija Grzegorek
Was it stupid and foolhardy to hike Mount Batur alone? Sure. Possibly the type of test that only an inordinate (or imbalanced) amount of testosterone would cause someone to subject themselves to? Maybe so. Regardless, I was determined.
Getting to Mount Batur was straightforward. After an hour of following signs and stopping to speak with locals, the mountain came into view. It seemed to have two or three peaks, and there were both locals and tourists snapping photos from a viewpoint near the dusty town I entered.
As I headed in the direction where the policeman pointed me, I briefly closed my eyes and felt the breeze racing past my face; it felt amazing, and the air became warmer as I descended into the valley surrounding Danau Batur, the largest lake in Bali. The lake contained a handful of boats, and reflected the clouds above like a liquid mirror. If it suddenly turned to ice, I wondered if the image of the clouds would crystallize in it like a photograph. This caused me to pause, just for a moment, and marvel at all that I saw. A picturesque lake with Mount Batur for a backdrop. What could go wrong?
The main tourist office was a cross between a United States post office and a ticket counter at Six Flags, except there were no people behind the windows. Instead, a large man donning a checkered sarong and a shirt with the sleeves cut off approached me. He was tall, and had beautifully tattooed arms from his shoulder to his wrists.
Something told me this was the boss of the operation. His confidence, his measured speech, how casual his whole demeanor was, as well as the way he subtly rubbed his biceps, of course, all pointed to that. I wished I had never made myself known, but I had. I thanked him, shook hands and sped off.
I crept past the sign and down a narrow road, which must have been the road that the Bald Boss told me about. As I drove, I remembered reading that the mafia was known to slash tires, so I parked my scooter a few metres away from a nearby house, disguising it as belonged to the homeowner instead of a sneaky traveller.
The paved path quickly turned into dirt, and I walked past a tomato garden. A few metres later, I saw a broken-down house with a zinc roof. Young children with dirt on their faces were sitting on some steps and laughing to one another. They waved, and I waved back. Little did I know I was sounding the alarm.
The zinc-roofed homes and fields of tomatoes receded, and I found myself in a quiet forest. Tall trees, with bark stripped bare, lined my path. I looked around in amazement of all the deciduous flora, marvelling at how much the landscape suddenly resembled North America.
I followed my footprints back to where I came from, and found Uduyianyar sleeping a little farther down, where I met the second of three gatekeepers. Uduyianyar sprang awake when I walked by and asked for the 100,000. I gave it to him and kept on.
I am living in Bali and experienced this also by myself. I dont like to pay to mafia so i decided to hike mt. Batur just by myself (and that time with my ex who is indo). We knew about mafia (was year 2019). So we just parket scooter by local house and followed others. We pretended she is my local guide, but later they started to ask do you have guide ?? . But i said yes her and just continued hiking. But in the way back when was daylight they started to be more offensive a screaming the same, but we were already down and just left very quickly. Sadly, local mafia is operating in Bali and government is doing nothing with that. I think its because some of them are connected to mafia and getting money from that. Its happening also when you gonna visit Sekumpul waterfall. The entrance fee is 20k irp, but they will not let you go if dont pay for guide 400k. Some of people (especially locals) like to talk that we have to respect this prices because people are poor. People are poor more because these money ends up in mafia pocket instead going into budget of villages near by.
Batur is a UNESCO site and rightly there should be an entrance charged to visit it because there is an upkeep of trails, temples, roads. I doubt very much you would challenge the entrance fees into other national parks in the US and Europe (some of which require registration and fee payment).
The sign you have posted is now gone and another has been put up a lot higher (at least on the trail around the back from the hot springs and through the forested area where that gorgeous temple is nestled). And people should pay. The trails are eroded and with increasingly egotistical means to conquer the mountain (dirt biking is all the rage now) the maintenance of access to the top needs to come from somewhere (it is also for safety of climbers and bikers).
Also, Batur is not just another mountain but it has an incredible history. To know that you are actually climbing a parasitic cone from the crater of the original volcano is not only fascinating but it also fires up the imagination. I think it is worth some fee.
I completely disagree, this is just ethically unacceptable, I have been to many places much poorer than Bali and I never heard of such monetization. Please make money providing services and not extorting people. If there is a price to pay, it should be an official entry point from the government.
Mateo! What a great story and inspiration! I stumbled across this article and found it extremely difficult to keep my eyes off the screen. You have written this in such a vivid way that I almost felt like I was with you on parts of your journey. I now want to climb this mountain alone.
Thank you for such a fascinating read.
Matteo! You are an inspiration!
At the same time we realize more and more that we made right decision not to hike this mountain. There was so much disappointment around Bali, and trekking to Mt. Batur was one of them.
Thanks for sharing your story, I was reading with my mouth being open!
Our new friend kindly informed us that we were not allowed to decline the rides. He said that, for our safety, we had to get transport from the accredited association of which he was a part. We pointed out that we would be travelling with a scout who would be responsible for our safety. Yohannes stuck to his position. Mallika and I decided to agree to disagree for now, and try to find a tuk-tuk driver early the next morning who could bring us into the Simiens.
Our scout, Getachew, was an old man with a blanket, a tarp, a water bottle, and an AK-47. He wore sandals and a bright orange toque visible through dense fog, spoke less English than our three words of Amharic, and carried no food. Our driver stopped to let him buy some bread for the three-day journey, but Getachew found none to his liking and we drove on. We mentally prepared to divide our noodles and peanut butter by three, instead of two.
Scouts in the Simiens are grossly underpaid and undertrained for the difficult job they are asked to do. The government says it requires hikers to hire scouts because of some past aggression towards park visitors and thefts of gear and valuables. This means that scouts have to stay with groups for the duration of the hike, including watching over them at night. They must climb the same ridges, withstand the same cold and rain, and put in the same long trail days as the hikers. For this grueling, 24-hours-a-day task, they receive no gear or food from the park other than the AK-47.
Our second day dawned cold and gray. Getachew, offering us an easy way out, encouraged us to hitchhike on the park road to the next campsite. We stubbornly marched on, and the mountains rewarded us with intimate views of the Geladas and epic cloudforms billowing over the ridges. Soon, though, rain started and our pace slowed. The trail became increasingly treacherous, consisting in parts of barely anchored mud on a steep incline.
At the same time, we gained urgency from the edge of hostility we detected in some people we passed. Groups of boys materialized from behind high crags to stare at us, with their dogs growling menacingly. Three young girls sat by the roadside and smiled at us as we approached, but hurled insults as we declined their handicrafts. A glowering man waved us past his field. There was a tangible disconnect between our vacation-time, in-and-out experience of these mountains and the reality of their lives in this rough terrain. We glimpsed villages and isolated households on neighboring ridges, and could not fathom the difficulty of life that their location implied.
The real conservation challenge, very different than what most Canadian parks face, is to provide some opportunity more enticing than encroaching on the park. Patrols and enforcement, and scouts who are given no resources to work with, cannot sustainably conserve this land.
Currently, the bulk of park tourist income flows to guided tours or the Transport Mafia, who have used marketing, aggression, and force to corner the market. There are no effective policies or practices to spread the money more evenly.
As we closed in on Chenek, Getachew sped up to an unexpectedly nimble trot and his enthusiasm combined with the thickening groves of otherworldly giant lobelias to get us properly excited. Little by little, the clouds opened up and breaks in the ridgeline revealed endless broken ridges. Adrenaline hit us all at once, and we whooped as we flew into Chenek, a beautiful hanging valley with rushing streams and pristine alpine steppe surreally broken up by alien megaflora. We found a dry patch to set up our tent and managed to order a solid injera dinner at a well-kept roadside hut. Best of all, a pump next to a chuckling stream gave us infinite water after we had come so far with so little. We had made it. We were preparing to sink into absolute blissful laziness when Mallika spotted a deep orange glow on the ridge behind us. The sun, blocked by a hill in front of us, must be setting; we left the injera and sprinted up the hill to catch it.
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