Teletubbies Hill (Bukit Teletubbies / Savana)

On the far side of the caldera from the volcanoes, the grey ash gives way to a wide grassland of low, rounded hills. Indonesians nicknamed it Bukit Teletubbies after the smooth mounds in the children's programme, and it is also signposted as the Savana. The contrast is the whole point. You spend the early morning on a moonscape of volcanic dust and then, twenty minutes further into the southern part of the caldera, you are standing in grass with steep green walls rising around you.

It is the calmest of the four stops. By the time jeeps get here the sunrise scramble is over, the groups have thinned out, and there is enough space that you can walk a few hundred metres and be more or less alone. That makes it the one place in the park where people actually slow down, rather than queueing for a photograph and getting back in the vehicle.

The colour of the grass depends on how much rain there has been recently rather than on a fixed calendar, and it swings between properly green and dry gold. Nobody publishes a reliable month by month guide to this, so do not plan a trip around it. What is fixed is the access: like Whispering Sands, the savanna is only on the longer four location jeep package. The cheap sunrise and crater run turns back before it, and a fair number of visitors only discover this when the jeep starts heading downhill. There is no shade out here and nothing sold, so it is a walk and a look rather than a place to linger for hours.