• Skip to primary navigation
  • Skip to main content
  • Skip to primary sidebar
  • Skip to footer
  • Home
  • About Me
  • Contact Me
Walking Commentary

Walking Commentary

Thoughts while waiting to walk from Manchester to Rome in 2022

  • ManRom22 Cancelled
  • Latest Comments
  • Archives

Volcanoes and Cars

March 3, 2021 by Simon Robinson 2 Comments

There was another volcanic episode in the news this evening. Mt Etna has been active in Sicily for weeks but now, Mount Sinabung in Sumatra is back in the news too. It’s been blasting volcanic ejecta five kilometres into the sky for a few days. The ash rains back down as choking, abrasive dust. That might seem awful but it’s relatively good news if you live beside an active volcano on The Ring of Fire.

GT40 in Texas in 2013

A few years before the Sumatran Mount Sinabung awoke from a four hundred year sleep in 2010, I had hoped to travel to Borabadur in central Java for the weekend. I was already in Jakarta, so the trip to visit the world’s largest Buddhist temple wasn’t as extreme as you might think. The idea was to fly to Yoyakarta and drive to the 9th century Mahayana temple for the day. 

Beautiful Mount Merapi is just 25 km from the temple. The local take is that Merapi is a sentient being that chooses to erupt. It chose that week, a few days before I might have been there. I was advised, no told, not to travel. That was good advice because Merapi is famous for its long and cyclic history of pyroclastic flows. You might think of Pompeii. The poisonous gases and tephra at about 1,000 °C in nuées ardentes can flow down slope at 80 or more km per hour. Think total destruction and burial. Like Pompeii, where vitrified brains have recently been recovered from people killed two thousand years ago.

Think of the large town of Saint-Pierre in the Caribbean’s Lesser Antilles. Mount Pelée erupted there in 1902 and killed 30,000 people in just a few minutes. And back on Java, Merapi itself wiped out thirteen villages and 1400 people in 1930.

Staying on Java, and Jakarta, a colleague was attending a business breakfast in a small function room in the Marriott Hotel in Jakarta one day in 2009. He didn’t die when a suicide bomber burst into the meeting room and detonated himself. Several businessmen were killed and a waiter too. My colleague took a long time to recover from very serious injuries that changed his life forever. He returned to work eventually and we admired him greatly for doing so. 

Which would you prefer for touring France? M5 or GT40?
The M5 is seen near Tours, the GT40s were seen during their trip to Spa-Francorchamps.

I remember meeting him around the time of his retirement. We shared a passion for motor sports and we both drove extreme cars for a while. No matter mine, this is about his. He driven to our office where he showed me around his street legal replica GT40 which he later toured around the US for a while after retirement. The 40 refers to the height of the roof from the ground. So low I couldn’t get in. Except it was the 43 inch, replica version that I was unable to fold myself into. I was carrying a neck injury at the time otherwise, I’m certain I’d have made it. Can you imagine, he travelled the US with his wife in there too. That’s dedication for you.

Caveat emptor: my daily musings may not be complete let alone correct.

Filed Under: Fake Memoir Tagged With: borabadur, cars, indonesia, merapi, pompeii, travel, volcano

Reader Interactions

Comments

  1. Robert says

    March 13, 2021 at 1:13 pm

    Etna is in Sicily

    Reply
    • Simon Robinson says

      March 14, 2021 at 10:28 am

      Arrghh and thank you. I have no idea why I typed Sardinia.

      Reply

Leave a Reply Cancel reply

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *

Primary Sidebar

Subscribe

You’ve been successfully subscribed to our newsletter!

Recent Comments

  • Simon Robinson on 2023 Subscriptions
  • Catherine Dunne on 2023 Subscriptions
  • Lia Mills on Apertures
  • Lia Mills on Limerick Walls
  • Simon Robinson on Via Graffiti

Categories

  • Anchoritism
  • Chapbooks
  • Fake Memoir
  • ManRom2021

Tags

ahmet altan albert einstein bbc birds bird watching booklink bracket books ireland brian greene burma cancer chapbook colum mccann computing Covid-19 dog dun laoghaire fabhappy flowers food geology geophysics hans rosling ireland irish times issued lia mills london movies nobel prize pandemic PEN international photo photography photos photozines plants poetry popular simonscarves the uplift kit travel ungrievable volcano walking walkingcommentary

Recent Posts

  • Rounded
  • Watershapes
  • Machine Driven
  • 2023 Subscriptions
  • Apertures

Archives

  • January 2023 (1)
  • December 2022 (1)
  • November 2022 (2)
  • October 2022 (1)
  • September 2022 (1)
  • August 2022 (1)
  • July 2022 (1)
  • June 2022 (1)
  • May 2022 (1)
  • April 2022 (1)
  • March 2022 (1)
  • February 2022 (1)
  • January 2022 (2)
  • December 2021 (2)
  • November 2021 (1)
  • October 2021 (1)
  • September 2021 (2)
  • August 2021 (1)
  • July 2021 (2)
  • May 2021 (9)
  • April 2021 (30)
  • March 2021 (31)
  • February 2021 (28)
  • January 2021 (31)
  • December 2020 (31)
  • November 2020 (30)
  • October 2020 (31)
  • September 2020 (30)
  • August 2020 (31)
  • July 2020 (31)
  • June 2020 (30)
  • May 2020 (31)
  • April 2020 (30)
  • March 2020 (31)

Footer

  • Home
  • About Me
  • Contact Me
  • ManRom22 Cancelled
  • Latest Comments
  • Archives

Subscribe

You’ve been successfully subscribed to our newsletter!

Copyright © 2023 · Revolution Pro on Genesis Framework