Brazilian hiker found dead in Indonesia four days after falling into active volcano - despite frantic rescue attempts
A Brazilian tourist trapped for days when she plunged off a cliff next to an active volcano in Indonesia was found dead Tuesday — after frantic efforts to save her were repeatedly thwarted by bad weather.
Juliana Marins, a 26-year-old pole-dancing publicist, had been hiking with a group of friends on Mount Rinjani — a popular tourist site in the Southeast Asian archipelago — when she slipped and fell about 490 feet down the cliff face Saturday morning, according to Indonesian authorities.
As of Monday, the vacationer had slipped to more than 1,600 feet.
Initial 'screams for help' from Marins were heard, and drone footage showed her still alive after her first fall. But rescue crews were unable to reach her because of the thick fog engulfing the volcano and other adverse conditions.
In addition to the visibility issues, the head of the local rescuers, Muhammad Hariyadi, said the young woman had become trapped on soft sand, making it difficult to try and retrieve her with ropes.
Two futile rescue attempts were made, authorities said.
'After four days of work, hindered by adverse weather, terrain and visibility conditions in the region, teams from Indonesia's Search and Rescue Agency found the body of the Brazilian tourist,' Brazil's government said in a statement Tuesday.
It wasn't immediately clear when Marins died — or if workers were able to retrieve her body yet. The US Sun said she worked as a publicist in Brazil, and her Instagram showed she also was a pole dancer.
Her grief-stricken family said in a statement, 'Today the rescue team checked the location where Juliana Marins was.
'With much sadness we have to report that she did not survive. We remain very grateful for all the prayers, messages of love and support we have received.'
Roughly 50 people were involved in the search.
In the wake of the discovery, the Mount Rinjani hiking track was closed to helped the evacuation effort and out of respect to Marins and her family, Indonesian Forestry Minister Raja Juli Antoni said.
With Post wires
Originally published as Brazilian hiker found dead in Indonesia four days after falling into active volcano - despite frantic rescue attempts
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The Age
2 days ago
- The Age
One of the world's most beautiful walks can now be done in style
Along a spiralling mountain trail on a morning when the air's so chilled and dry your breath feels ragged before it even leaves your diaphragm, I note that neither burgers nor beers from the night before are an ideal preparation for a 70-kilometre-or-so walk along South America's most famous hiking trail. 'Nothing in Patagonia is flat,' my guide, Patrick Smith (despite his notably Anglo moniker, he's very much a Chilean) warned. 'Even flat places in Patagonia are not flat.' And how about the notoriously wild, windy weather we may encounter here, amid one of the planet's last great icy wildernesses? 'The only thing I'm sure about the weather in Patagonia is that I'm never sure about the weather in Patagonia,' Smith says. Today it's windy but not 'Patagonia' windy. It's blowy enough for me to lose my hat, but Smith tells me an Irishman blew right off this mountain trail we are hiking. 'And last summer,' he says, 'I caught a Brazilian lady in the air and tackled her to the ground like a rugby player.' This is my first full day on the W Hike in Chile's Torres del Paine National Park. One of the world's most beautiful walks, it's a five-day, 74-kilometre journey that traverses valleys, glaciers, mountain lakes and the tallest peaks in southern Patagonia. It has long been the domain of the hardened hiker, one who camps along the way, or sleeps in dorm rooms within refugios (basic mountain huts), and who wakes at dawn to line up at buffets for cornflakes and scrambled eggs. But I'm doing the W differently. Global adventure company Guided By Nature, in partnership with Australian operator Tasmanian Walking Company, has launched a new seven-day, six-night luxury guided hike which makes one of the world's most revered adventure challenges accessible to a wider range of hikers. We'll hike almost the entire trail and return all but one night to boutique lodgings that serve three-course gourmet meals with matched Chilean wines. DAYS TWO TO THREE: Of scrambled eggs and fresh legs Just because our scrambled eggs are fluffier, doesn't mean our hiking trails are shorter, Smith and fellow guide Juan Ignacio Rios Villablanca (now there's a proper Patagonian guide's name) says at a pre-hike briefing. They tell us we will walk an average of 16 kilometres, between seven and 10 hours, each day. The W Hike can be completed west to east or east to west. We're going east to west, so the most challenging, steeper section of the trail is earlier in the trek. We can hike it with fresh legs. My fresh legs will tackle a 22-kilometre slog up and down 800 metres of elevation to the base of Torres del Paine National Park's most iconic landform: Torres del Paine, three jagged granite peaks carved out by glaciers and erosion over millions of years and rising to almost 3000 metres. This section of the W Hike is the busiest, particularly in summer. Most of the 250,000 hikers who visit each year descend on the park between December and March. Guided By Nature's guided hikes are offered in November and April and the park is relatively deserted today as I traverse a dusty dirt road. Guanacos, a species of camelid native to South America and closely related to the llama, feed skittishly by the roadside. They're like hamburger patties to the park's most celebrated resident, the puma, though Villablanca says puma sightings are rare, even though we are moving through an area with the world's highest density of the creatures. They hunt mostly at night and are notoriously stealthy. 'If you're lucky enough to see a puma,' he says. 'It has already seen you 10 times.' But five minutes into our hike, three pumas run right across the trail in front of me, chasing a herd of doomed European hares. Villablanca shakes his head and grins. 'It's all downhill from here,' he says. He's wrong, of course. It's so uphill that my muscles begin to feel like fraying rubber bands. I climb on rocky trails up and across the sheer sides of mountains, through lenga (beech) forest, along suspension bridges over the glassy Asencio River, giving way to locals carrying supplies on horseback. The trail gets perpendicular near the top (fortuitous that I found the hiking shoes I'd stashed in a box in my storage shed after my last hike, around 2019). But there's a reward for those who push through pain to get to the top: one of the world's most famous alpine vistas. Across a jade-coloured lake distorted by glacial 'flour', produced when rocks are ground down by glaciers across millions of years, lie the Torres Del Paine. The first tourist to see these, a 24-year-old Scottish travel writer named Lady Florence Dixie who travelled here by horse in 1879, described them as 'three tall peaks of reddish hue and in sharp exact facsimiles of Cleopatra's needles'. Her accounts provided the outside world with its first glimpse of a wilderness at the end of the world. Going downhill requires an entirely different set of muscles. Gravity helps, at least initially, and then it turns on me as I discover delicate tendons necessary for braking on the outside of both knees I never knew I had. By the end of the trail, I hobble into the carpark like I'd just fought a war. I slept in a tent when I climbed Kilimanjaro; I used Asia's sketchiest squat toilets on a trek in the Indian Himalayas; but now a van is here to transport me to my private lodge. The lodge's lounge looks out to a calm lake and there's a log fire burning. A bottle of Chilean Carmenere, which looks to have my name on it, and a meal of grilled prawns, local lamb and calafate berry ice-cream follow. Through floor-to-ceiling windows I wouldn't dare cover with curtains, I see the snow-capped mountains of the Paine massif lit by a smudge of twinkling Milky Way. I fall asleep under my duck-down duvet long before I get to ponder if I've gone soft in middle age. DAYS FOUR TO FIVE: A dorm is now the norm Adios chef Valeska, ciao linen sheets. Today I hike to a refugio and a shared dorm room. Torres del Paine may be famous for winds that can reach 180km/h and beyond, but on this brisk, blue-sky April morning, I can't feel a breath of it. So I ride on the deck of a catamaran across Lake Pehoe, the mountains reflected on its surface. Today we hike the western edge of the W trail to Grey glacier, the last leg for those walking east to west. It's a shorter trek and a respite after yesterday's skip the central valley for now: that's the power you yield when you dissect an arduous hike like this to make it more user-friendly. I love the flatness of this trail, staring up at mountains that dazzle with refracted sunlight. Then it climbs and climbs and climbs. Now I scramble along a narrow rocky crest between the park's tallest peak, Cerro Paine Grande (2884 metres) and Grey Lake below. Cascades from Paine Grande gush out, feeding the tiny creeks I cross. Straight ahead is Grey Glacier, part of the Southern Patagonian Ice Field, the world's second-largest extra-polar icefield, which once covered all of southern Chile and Argentina. Beside it is Grey refugio, a two-star hut with room for 60 hikers. Inside I find a bar with a five-star view of the mountain range, a worthy spot to rest hamstrings, quadriceps and calves that have been forced to eccentrically contract to prevent a tumble down the mountain paths. Dinner's a passable buffet of pasta and grilled chicken at a table in the corner, where I see the mountain in sunset turn a shade of lilac. Later, I'm reminded of what it's like to share a dorm room: the race to get to sleep to beat the other snorers, the shuddering on your bunk as your upstairs neighbour sneaks off to the toilet at 2.30am. I'm totally OK that we're doing it for just one night. Next morning, I take a Zodiac to the edge of Grey glacier, passing icebergs along the way. The glacier's as blue as it is white – air bubbles squeezed out of the glacier across hundreds of years make it appear bright blue. I wear crampons to grip the slippery surface and use an ice axe for stability to walk across the ice, stopping at a lagoon as turquoise as any in the South Pacific. I pick at the edge of the water and place the tiny shards of centuries-old ice into my mouth. Below the surface, there are caves. I descend into one along a rope attached by a guide. Below, water flows through a chamber within the cave, just like a waterslide. The landscape changes as the ice melts, creating new lagoons and caves between which the guides build new paths. Melts can reveal hidden wonders. In 2022, palaeontologists unearthed fossilised remains of a dolphin-like creature – an ichthyosaurs – from within the boundaries of the Torres del Paine National Park. These creatures are thought to have existed between 90 and 245 million years ago. We leave the ice and retreat to a grey-sand beach to catch a catamaran to where our van driver waits for us. Tonight, I don't wear thongs in the shower. DAY SIX: In a world of shock and phwoar Today we're returning to the centre of the W, but where two days prior we walked west to Grey glacier, now we're hiking east, to the French Valley. Today there's even less wind than days four and five and the stillness makes the landscape look surreal. I bug my hiking companions with random adjectives – sometimes just sounds – round most corners. 'Phwoar'. But you should see this place. In a park of plenty, here's the most plentiful. The head of the French Valley is a cirque formed by tall cliffs. Huge walls two kilometres high punctuate the western region, while the eastern face could be the planet's largest cathedral. Suspension bridges, which allow for just two to cross at a time, provide access to the valley across the clearest river I've seen, Rio del Frances. All around me, firetrees catch the autumn sunlight, providing the illusion that its evergreen vivid red flowers are actually igniting. While Chile is ineffably peaceful, it's not silent. The W Hike never is. Water gushes from everywhere: waterfalls, creeks and rivers; birds cry out; and sometimes I hear drumming as Magellanic woodpeckers search for insects in the trees of the surrounding forest. The path's much flatter in the French Valley. During the practice hike on day two, one of my fellow hikers – a grimacing, but jolly, Utahn with a dicky knee – surprised me when he smiled through his moustache and declared to no one in particular: 'I'm in that zone.' Is this what he meant? I'm seeing butterflies I'm not sure are really there. I'm hearing sweet, soft music in my head. And I'm grinning as if it's happy gas I'm sucking from my hydration pack, not water with the extra electrolyte tablet I add each morning because I think it makes me walk faster. We walk higher and higher up the valley wall through what looks like a Japanese ornamental garden. Below, Rio del Frances sparkles where it turns into rapids between its grey rock banks. Above, glaciers hang over the edge of the Grande glacier, like layers of icing oozing off a fresh-baked cake. DAYS SIX TO SEVEN: No pain, no gain We'll have a long, last dinner tonight, a final chance to bond, since we won't get to clean our teeth together in a communal bathroom next morning. How do I feel that I didn't do the W hike in one go, completing it like all the rest: east to west, or west to east? (We miss 13 kilometres of the W, a section east of the French Valley that connects with our first-day hike to the Base of the Towers). Well, I feel tired. Really tired. I hiked 68 kilometres. I walked for 30 hours, a lot of it uphill, a lot of it downhill. My legs ache and my blistered big right toe doesn't seem to care that I slept in my own room, not a shared dorm. On my return to Australia, a friend asks why I didn't camp along the trail to feel like I really did the hike. He told me of his journey with his 70-year-old father. Their tent nearly blew away one night in a violent storm; his hiking shoes disintegrated on the second day so he walked in the trainers he brought for the plane. They both suffered diarrhoea from drinking contaminated water. 'Maybe you answered your own question,' I suggest. Five other hikes to tackle in relative comfor t Haute Route, Europe Hike for nine days from Chamonix in France to the Matterhorn in Switzerland, sampling gourmet cuisine of the three countries (Italy, France and Switzerland) along the way. Numerous travel companies provide luxury guided tours with boutique accommodation in mountain villages. Loading Milford Track, New Zealand The iconic Kiwi hike, a 54-kilometre trek to Milford Sound on the South Island's wild west coast, can be done in comfort across four or five nights, staying in luxurious mountain lodges with gourmet meals and private rooms between November and April. Travel companies offer various experiences. Machu Picchu, Peru Take a seven-day fully guided tour of the lesser-known valleys surrounding Machu Picchu, such as the Lares and Sacred valleys, staying in boutique mountain lodges along the way. You'll still get to end your tour at this well-known wonder of the world, but you'll avoid the often booked-out Inca Trail, a four-day hike requiring nightly camping. Camino de Santiago, Europe Many travel companies offer all-levels-of-luxury tours hiking a portion of this 800 kilometre pilgrimage trail across (mostly) Spain. There are tours of between four and 30-days duration with accommodation everywhere from Benedictine monasteries to five-star private lodges. Appalachian Trail, US Dozens of luxury tour companies offer the opportunity to hike a portion of America's most famous hike, which begins in Georgia and ends in Maine, passing through 14 states and covering 3540 kilometres. Tours include inn-to-inn hiking, staying in the best accommodation available with meals at restaurants. The details Loading Tour Guided By Nature's seven-day/six-night guided tour of the W Hike in Torres del Paine National Park, with all meals included and accommodation at Kau Rio Serrano Lodge, from $9895 a person departing in November and April. See Fly Qantas ( and LATAM ( fly from Sydney to Santiago four times a week from $2500 return, with onward connections with LATAM to Puerto Natales (where guests are met).
Sydney Morning Herald
2 days ago
- Sydney Morning Herald
One of the world's most beautiful walks can now be done in style
Along a spiralling mountain trail on a morning when the air's so chilled and dry your breath feels ragged before it even leaves your diaphragm, I note that neither burgers nor beers from the night before are an ideal preparation for a 70-kilometre-or-so walk along South America's most famous hiking trail. 'Nothing in Patagonia is flat,' my guide, Patrick Smith (despite his notably Anglo moniker, he's very much a Chilean) warned. 'Even flat places in Patagonia are not flat.' And how about the notoriously wild, windy weather we may encounter here, amid one of the planet's last great icy wildernesses? 'The only thing I'm sure about the weather in Patagonia is that I'm never sure about the weather in Patagonia,' Smith says. Today it's windy but not 'Patagonia' windy. It's blowy enough for me to lose my hat, but Smith tells me an Irishman blew right off this mountain trail we are hiking. 'And last summer,' he says, 'I caught a Brazilian lady in the air and tackled her to the ground like a rugby player.' This is my first full day on the W Hike in Chile's Torres del Paine National Park. One of the world's most beautiful walks, it's a five-day, 74-kilometre journey that traverses valleys, glaciers, mountain lakes and the tallest peaks in southern Patagonia. It has long been the domain of the hardened hiker, one who camps along the way, or sleeps in dorm rooms within refugios (basic mountain huts), and who wakes at dawn to line up at buffets for cornflakes and scrambled eggs. But I'm doing the W differently. Global adventure company Guided By Nature, in partnership with Australian operator Tasmanian Walking Company, has launched a new seven-day, six-night luxury guided hike which makes one of the world's most revered adventure challenges accessible to a wider range of hikers. We'll hike almost the entire trail and return all but one night to boutique lodgings that serve three-course gourmet meals with matched Chilean wines. DAYS TWO TO THREE: Of scrambled eggs and fresh legs Just because our scrambled eggs are fluffier, doesn't mean our hiking trails are shorter, Smith and fellow guide Juan Ignacio Rios Villablanca (now there's a proper Patagonian guide's name) says at a pre-hike briefing. They tell us we will walk an average of 16 kilometres, between seven and 10 hours, each day. The W Hike can be completed west to east or east to west. We're going east to west, so the most challenging, steeper section of the trail is earlier in the trek. We can hike it with fresh legs. My fresh legs will tackle a 22-kilometre slog up and down 800 metres of elevation to the base of Torres del Paine National Park's most iconic landform: Torres del Paine, three jagged granite peaks carved out by glaciers and erosion over millions of years and rising to almost 3000 metres. This section of the W Hike is the busiest, particularly in summer. Most of the 250,000 hikers who visit each year descend on the park between December and March. Guided By Nature's guided hikes are offered in November and April and the park is relatively deserted today as I traverse a dusty dirt road. Guanacos, a species of camelid native to South America and closely related to the llama, feed skittishly by the roadside. They're like hamburger patties to the park's most celebrated resident, the puma, though Villablanca says puma sightings are rare, even though we are moving through an area with the world's highest density of the creatures. They hunt mostly at night and are notoriously stealthy. 'If you're lucky enough to see a puma,' he says. 'It has already seen you 10 times.' But five minutes into our hike, three pumas run right across the trail in front of me, chasing a herd of doomed European hares. Villablanca shakes his head and grins. 'It's all downhill from here,' he says. He's wrong, of course. It's so uphill that my muscles begin to feel like fraying rubber bands. I climb on rocky trails up and across the sheer sides of mountains, through lenga (beech) forest, along suspension bridges over the glassy Asencio River, giving way to locals carrying supplies on horseback. The trail gets perpendicular near the top (fortuitous that I found the hiking shoes I'd stashed in a box in my storage shed after my last hike, around 2019). But there's a reward for those who push through pain to get to the top: one of the world's most famous alpine vistas. Across a jade-coloured lake distorted by glacial 'flour', produced when rocks are ground down by glaciers across millions of years, lie the Torres Del Paine. The first tourist to see these, a 24-year-old Scottish travel writer named Lady Florence Dixie who travelled here by horse in 1879, described them as 'three tall peaks of reddish hue and in sharp exact facsimiles of Cleopatra's needles'. Her accounts provided the outside world with its first glimpse of a wilderness at the end of the world. Going downhill requires an entirely different set of muscles. Gravity helps, at least initially, and then it turns on me as I discover delicate tendons necessary for braking on the outside of both knees I never knew I had. By the end of the trail, I hobble into the carpark like I'd just fought a war. I slept in a tent when I climbed Kilimanjaro; I used Asia's sketchiest squat toilets on a trek in the Indian Himalayas; but now a van is here to transport me to my private lodge. The lodge's lounge looks out to a calm lake and there's a log fire burning. A bottle of Chilean Carmenere, which looks to have my name on it, and a meal of grilled prawns, local lamb and calafate berry ice-cream follow. Through floor-to-ceiling windows I wouldn't dare cover with curtains, I see the snow-capped mountains of the Paine massif lit by a smudge of twinkling Milky Way. I fall asleep under my duck-down duvet long before I get to ponder if I've gone soft in middle age. DAYS FOUR TO FIVE: A dorm is now the norm Adios chef Valeska, ciao linen sheets. Today I hike to a refugio and a shared dorm room. Torres del Paine may be famous for winds that can reach 180km/h and beyond, but on this brisk, blue-sky April morning, I can't feel a breath of it. So I ride on the deck of a catamaran across Lake Pehoe, the mountains reflected on its surface. Today we hike the western edge of the W trail to Grey glacier, the last leg for those walking east to west. It's a shorter trek and a respite after yesterday's skip the central valley for now: that's the power you yield when you dissect an arduous hike like this to make it more user-friendly. I love the flatness of this trail, staring up at mountains that dazzle with refracted sunlight. Then it climbs and climbs and climbs. Now I scramble along a narrow rocky crest between the park's tallest peak, Cerro Paine Grande (2884 metres) and Grey Lake below. Cascades from Paine Grande gush out, feeding the tiny creeks I cross. Straight ahead is Grey Glacier, part of the Southern Patagonian Ice Field, the world's second-largest extra-polar icefield, which once covered all of southern Chile and Argentina. Beside it is Grey refugio, a two-star hut with room for 60 hikers. Inside I find a bar with a five-star view of the mountain range, a worthy spot to rest hamstrings, quadriceps and calves that have been forced to eccentrically contract to prevent a tumble down the mountain paths. Dinner's a passable buffet of pasta and grilled chicken at a table in the corner, where I see the mountain in sunset turn a shade of lilac. Later, I'm reminded of what it's like to share a dorm room: the race to get to sleep to beat the other snorers, the shuddering on your bunk as your upstairs neighbour sneaks off to the toilet at 2.30am. I'm totally OK that we're doing it for just one night. Next morning, I take a Zodiac to the edge of Grey glacier, passing icebergs along the way. The glacier's as blue as it is white – air bubbles squeezed out of the glacier across hundreds of years make it appear bright blue. I wear crampons to grip the slippery surface and use an ice axe for stability to walk across the ice, stopping at a lagoon as turquoise as any in the South Pacific. I pick at the edge of the water and place the tiny shards of centuries-old ice into my mouth. Below the surface, there are caves. I descend into one along a rope attached by a guide. Below, water flows through a chamber within the cave, just like a waterslide. The landscape changes as the ice melts, creating new lagoons and caves between which the guides build new paths. Melts can reveal hidden wonders. In 2022, palaeontologists unearthed fossilised remains of a dolphin-like creature – an ichthyosaurs – from within the boundaries of the Torres del Paine National Park. These creatures are thought to have existed between 90 and 245 million years ago. We leave the ice and retreat to a grey-sand beach to catch a catamaran to where our van driver waits for us. Tonight, I don't wear thongs in the shower. DAY SIX: In a world of shock and phwoar Today we're returning to the centre of the W, but where two days prior we walked west to Grey glacier, now we're hiking east, to the French Valley. Today there's even less wind than days four and five and the stillness makes the landscape look surreal. I bug my hiking companions with random adjectives – sometimes just sounds – round most corners. 'Phwoar'. But you should see this place. In a park of plenty, here's the most plentiful. The head of the French Valley is a cirque formed by tall cliffs. Huge walls two kilometres high punctuate the western region, while the eastern face could be the planet's largest cathedral. Suspension bridges, which allow for just two to cross at a time, provide access to the valley across the clearest river I've seen, Rio del Frances. All around me, firetrees catch the autumn sunlight, providing the illusion that its evergreen vivid red flowers are actually igniting. While Chile is ineffably peaceful, it's not silent. The W Hike never is. Water gushes from everywhere: waterfalls, creeks and rivers; birds cry out; and sometimes I hear drumming as Magellanic woodpeckers search for insects in the trees of the surrounding forest. The path's much flatter in the French Valley. During the practice hike on day two, one of my fellow hikers – a grimacing, but jolly, Utahn with a dicky knee – surprised me when he smiled through his moustache and declared to no one in particular: 'I'm in that zone.' Is this what he meant? I'm seeing butterflies I'm not sure are really there. I'm hearing sweet, soft music in my head. And I'm grinning as if it's happy gas I'm sucking from my hydration pack, not water with the extra electrolyte tablet I add each morning because I think it makes me walk faster. We walk higher and higher up the valley wall through what looks like a Japanese ornamental garden. Below, Rio del Frances sparkles where it turns into rapids between its grey rock banks. Above, glaciers hang over the edge of the Grande glacier, like layers of icing oozing off a fresh-baked cake. DAYS SIX TO SEVEN: No pain, no gain We'll have a long, last dinner tonight, a final chance to bond, since we won't get to clean our teeth together in a communal bathroom next morning. How do I feel that I didn't do the W hike in one go, completing it like all the rest: east to west, or west to east? (We miss 13 kilometres of the W, a section east of the French Valley that connects with our first-day hike to the Base of the Towers). Well, I feel tired. Really tired. I hiked 68 kilometres. I walked for 30 hours, a lot of it uphill, a lot of it downhill. My legs ache and my blistered big right toe doesn't seem to care that I slept in my own room, not a shared dorm. On my return to Australia, a friend asks why I didn't camp along the trail to feel like I really did the hike. He told me of his journey with his 70-year-old father. Their tent nearly blew away one night in a violent storm; his hiking shoes disintegrated on the second day so he walked in the trainers he brought for the plane. They both suffered diarrhoea from drinking contaminated water. 'Maybe you answered your own question,' I suggest. Five other hikes to tackle in relative comfor t Haute Route, Europe Hike for nine days from Chamonix in France to the Matterhorn in Switzerland, sampling gourmet cuisine of the three countries (Italy, France and Switzerland) along the way. Numerous travel companies provide luxury guided tours with boutique accommodation in mountain villages. Loading Milford Track, New Zealand The iconic Kiwi hike, a 54-kilometre trek to Milford Sound on the South Island's wild west coast, can be done in comfort across four or five nights, staying in luxurious mountain lodges with gourmet meals and private rooms between November and April. Travel companies offer various experiences. Machu Picchu, Peru Take a seven-day fully guided tour of the lesser-known valleys surrounding Machu Picchu, such as the Lares and Sacred valleys, staying in boutique mountain lodges along the way. You'll still get to end your tour at this well-known wonder of the world, but you'll avoid the often booked-out Inca Trail, a four-day hike requiring nightly camping. Camino de Santiago, Europe Many travel companies offer all-levels-of-luxury tours hiking a portion of this 800 kilometre pilgrimage trail across (mostly) Spain. There are tours of between four and 30-days duration with accommodation everywhere from Benedictine monasteries to five-star private lodges. Appalachian Trail, US Dozens of luxury tour companies offer the opportunity to hike a portion of America's most famous hike, which begins in Georgia and ends in Maine, passing through 14 states and covering 3540 kilometres. Tours include inn-to-inn hiking, staying in the best accommodation available with meals at restaurants. The details Loading Tour Guided By Nature's seven-day/six-night guided tour of the W Hike in Torres del Paine National Park, with all meals included and accommodation at Kau Rio Serrano Lodge, from $9895 a person departing in November and April. See Fly Qantas ( and LATAM ( fly from Sydney to Santiago four times a week from $2500 return, with onward connections with LATAM to Puerto Natales (where guests are met).
News.com.au
2 days ago
- News.com.au
‘Danger is always lurking': Experts reveal what happens if you fall into an active volcano
The plight of a young Brazilian tourist who fell into an active volcano in Indonesia has raised questions about the dangers of trekking in the country, which is made up of some 17,000 islands and sits on the Pacific 'Ring of Fire'. 26-year-old Juliana Marins, a publicist and pole dancer from Rio de Janeiro, had been trying to summit Mount Rinjani, the second highest volcano in Indonesia, when she slipped and fell last week. While Rinjani is an 'active' volcano, it is not currently erupting and the last recorded eruption was in 2016 which caused a 2 kilometre ash plume but no fatalities. It has the potential to erupt periodically, unlike other volcanoes which are extinct, but it is not under 'alert' at the moment, meaning that an eruption is not considered imminent. Global health expert and medical doctor at YARSI University in Jakarta, Dr Dicky Budiman, explained to that Rinjani is extremely high with deep ravines, extreme temperatures and volcanic gases. 'If people fall while trekking, they can sustain multiple broken bones and traumatic head injuries which are the most dangerous and can be fatal,' he said. 'If people survive the initial fall, there are other risks such as poisonous gases and extreme temperatures which can cause asphyxia and hypothermia. 'When trekking on active volcanoes, there can be extremely high temperatures around thermal vents and poisonous gases which are colourless and have no smell, and can poison you without you knowing, causing you to have breathing problems, asphyxiate and die. 'Hypothermia can happen if victims fall into a crater lake and are in the water for a long time, but if they fall into an active crater, victims can also suffer from burns from piping hot steam or scorching hot surfaces.' Dr Budiman added that hikers should always follow the official paths and should not try to find alternative or illegal routes on mountainsides. They should also use local guides and follow their advice. He added that many foreign hikers in Indonesia were often ill prepared as the local terrain was very different to their home countries, and that anyone planning to trek in Indonesia should make sure that they were physically fit enough before starting out. 'Danger is always lurking' Local guides from across Indonesia, including those familiar with Rinjani, told that trekking in the country, which has some 130 active volcanoes, always carried some risk and that survival rates could be low if climbers found themselves in trouble. Samsul, who like many Indonesian goes by one name, is a local guide in Banten Province who has led tours around the Anak Krakatau volcano and Ujung Kulon National Park. He explained that safety protocols and planning were the key to staying safe. 'When you do an activity like this, you need to be extra careful and always double check to ensure that all members of the trek are accounted for,' he said. 'All recreational places are dangerous, in fact the dangerous ones are the ones that present the most interesting challenges and are like magnets for trekkers. 'Danger is always lurking, so you can't be even a little careless. A seasoned guide constantly needs to warn hikers about dangers along the climbing path which can cause slipping and falling, and other hazards such as fallen trees, potential landslides or loose rocks.' He added that this advice did not just apply to mountains and volcanoes, but that visitors to Indonesia needed to be mindful of safety whether they were in mountainous areas, forests and jungles, or the water. Another local climber Ajo, who previously worked as a guide leading trekkers to Mount Marapi which means 'Mountain of Fire' and is located in West Sumatra Province, said that, in his experience, it was rare for anyone to survive a fall while trekking – especially if evacuation was not carried out immediately due to poor weather or remote terrain. 'Usually people will have sustained injuries when they fall which will affect their ability to survive,' he explained. 'If you fall with inadequate protective equipment, it can be very dangerous to vulnerable parts of your body like your head and that makes the potential for death high. 'Trekking in Indonesia is inherently dangerous. However, the risk can be minimised with thorough preparation and knowledge of the dangers.' He added that just some of the perils included extreme weather, difficult terrain, the risk of getting lost, injury and wild animals. 'Besides that, the characteristics of each mountain are different, and sometimes that is what makes trekking dangerous and risky. Before trekking or climbing, we must know all about the specifics of the local terrain.' Ahmad Syamsul Hadi, a member of parliament for Central Lombok, told that Rinjani 'offers some of the best trekking in Indonesia' and was no more hazardous than other mountains across the country as long as tourists took appropriate precautions. 'There are of course challenges to trekking Rinjani, and you need to be physically fit and have a lot of stamina. 'The terrain is changeable and not in a straight line to the summit. 'The route takes you up and down, on flat paths, then hiking trails and then downhill. So it takes a lot of energy. 'It is not recommended that you attempt to trek by yourself if you are a beginner. It is not just a case of walking around a mountain for a few hours, you need to be much more prepared.' He added that, if things went wrong on a trek, it was often a race against time. 'People need to be rescued within 72 hours to have a chance of survival, especially if they do not have any food or water with them,' he said. 'The weather is also quite extreme on Rinjani due to its elevation of some 3000 metres and it is extremely cold.' Hadi said however that the Indonesian authorities were highly experienced in recovering stranded tourists, and that three separate helicopters had been dispatched to try and rescue Marins, with the governor of East Nusa Tenggara personally overseeing the mission in an effort to bring her home safely. 'We hope that everyone will be safe. We hope for the best,' he said. Fadli, who has worked as a porter on Rinjani for the past three years, carrying supplies and luggage for climbers, told that 'all mountains are dangerous'. 'The challenges on Rinjani are the same as other mountains in Indonesia, but the biggest problem is that climbers are often ill prepared when they attempt to summit the mountain and then descend. 'Examples of this would be not bringing enough water or food, or not bringing essential medication with them.' Fadli put survival rates of trekkers at 'about 50 per cent' if they suffered a fall, especially if they were close to the summit of a mountain where terrifyingly steep ravines can be between 500 metres to one kilometre deep and 'covered in loose rocks'. 'If a victim falls and gets snagged on a rock, there is a higher chance of survival, but if they just keep on falling, the chance decreases,' he said.
