Mount Kelud

Kelud is one of the deadliest volcanoes in Java, and the reason is its crater lake: eruptions eject the water as lahars, mudflows that run down the valleys and have killed thousands - some five thousand in 1919 alone. That disaster led the Dutch to drive a set of tunnels into the crater wall to drain the lake and keep its volume down, an engineering response repeated after later eruptions, and the Ampera tunnels are part of the site's story. The 2007 eruption pushed a lava dome up through the lake and evaporated most of it; the 2014 eruption blew the dome apart, threw ash across Java as far as Yogyakarta and closed airports for days. The crater is accessible by road when the alert level allows, and the landscape is raw grey ash and rock.

What you actually see

• A crater that keeps changing - lake, then lava dome, then blown apart in 2014.
• The drainage tunnels - the Dutch engineering driven in to reduce the lake.
• Raw ash landscape - grey rock and ash from the most recent eruption.
• A lahar history - the mudflows that killed thousands in 1919.

When to go

May to September; only when the alert level permits. Half a day.

Honest expectations

Access closes entirely on volcanic alerts, sometimes for long periods - check before travelling. The crater area is bare and hot. This volcano has killed on a large scale within living memory.

Nearby

Kediri is west; Malang and the Bromo area are east.