Mt. Pangrango near Jakarta, Indonesia

This August, I had the pleasure of attending my friend’s wedding in Jakarta, Indonesia (it was beautiful) and I thought I’d do some hiking near Jakarta. Here’s a brief account of my day trip to Mt. Gede Pangrango National Park (Bogor).

Summary of Day-hike

13h hike (piston)

3h from Jakarta by scooter

You need to pay for the permit + cannot climb alone. Bring a partner.

The National Park is situated south of Jakarta, about 3 hours scooter drive (50k) from central Jakarta. In Indonesia, everybody seems to use the scooters to go EVERWHERE and my friend and I left Jakarta around 5am and I scootered away in the morning sun.

The streets were already busy, buzzing with people overflowing from the markets on the sides of the streets. We were surrounded by other scooters making their way back to their homes and their other respective destinations, with goat’s head hanging off the sides and house wall insulations stacked up on the back of their scooters.

The pollution was so bad that I had to wear my medical mask and a bandana to cover my mouth and nose (I advise you to be prepared). We arrived at the basecamp around 8:30 and we headed to the registration office where they asked us for our permits. We didn’t realize that we needed a permit for a day hike. If you’re a local, you would have to register 3 days in advance but a foreigner like me, I could register on the day (along with my accompanying friend who is from Indonesia), although the entree fee was considerably higher for me (around 200k IDR = 14 USD).

For the permit, I had to show them my passport and had to do a quick medical check-up followed by submitting a rough plan of our hike. We started hiking at around 9:30am.

Now, I didn’t really expect the hike to take that long. I was expecting an easy day-hike and hadn’t slept properly for the prior few days due to the wedding (which I come to regret deeply by the end of the day).

There’s a couple of ways to enjoy hiking in this National Park which has become very popular over the recent few years due to its accessibility from Jakarta and the hype around hiking itself. The popular route is to do both peaks, Mt Gede (2958m) and Mt. Pangrango (3019m) over 2 nights/2 days. There is also a waterfall which is a much shorter hike easily done in a day. We only had a day so we opted to just do Mt. Pangrango.

My friend used to be in Mapala when he was at university, a student hiking community in Indonesia and had experience in this mountain range many times which was very assuring. The hike-up was pretty steep and was covered in trees all the way until the top, but it was we-paved and maintained and it was impossible to get lost, especially when there are so many other hikers around you. People we crossed were mainly from the local area, from Java at least which we could tell from the way we greeted (that’s what my friend had told me). I loved the greetings. It was all cheery and nice, and gave me a push to scrape up the energy that barely existed within me.

The route was quite sandy and slippery sometimes because of the volcanic nature of the mountains but there were plenty of routes and trees to hang onto. I was pretty surprised when I saw people climbing up in their sandals and flip-flops though.

We reached the top at around 4:30pm. At the top, there is a small opening where you can look down onto the crater of Mt. Gede and its ridges. It was cloudy all the way until the top so the view was rewarding than ever. From the summit, we hiked down around 10 mins in the opposite direction where there is an opening called Alun Alun Mandalawangi full of edelweiss, elderflowers.

We spent a good hour up there, just laying on the grass watching the sun slowly setting into an ocean of clouds while we munched on our snacks (bread with chocolate & cheese, classic Indonesian snacks). The breeze was crisp and cold, refreshing, but the sun shone upon us gently with its warmth and my body felt as light as ever.

2 hours into our hike-down, the sun had decided to abandon us and we said hello to our moon, who wasn’t as generous as the sun in giving us enough light to navigate our way. My friend had brought one torch but I had forgotten my headlamp back in Jakarta.

It turns out that hiking in the dark is a big thing in Indonesia. We came across a lot of night-hikers and we also met some hikers on patrol. Apparently, it was quite popular to hike during the night to aim for the sunset on summit.

By the time we got back to the basecamp to our scooter, it was already 10:30pm. The basecamp was unusually dark and quiet and it turns out that there was a massive black-out in Jakarta and in West Java that day which explained the closed stores.

We ate our midnight snack and drank our ever too sweet tea in the candlelight and scootered into the nights towards Jakarta. By this time, I had gotten very used to riding on the back of the scooter, so much so that I found it impossible not to fall asleep. I felt bad for my friend who was driving.

We arrived back way past midnight, almost 2am in Jakarta. It was a good day.