Kalyra was all excited to tell me about the hocano they made in pre-school. At first I really only caught the hoe sound to the word and began to worry about just what they were making at school. But after her description of the really hot bubbling blue stuff coming out of the middle and the dinosaurs that roam around the fence around it, I finally understood that she meant volcano.

I couldn’t stop asking her questions about it only because I wanted to hear her repeat the word hocano over and over again. What a delightful new word!

We talked all afternoon about the hocano and how she made it and that the blue stuff is really red and its called lava and is really really hot.

“Would you like to see a volcano that mummy has been to visit? It’s in my photo album.”

“Can I mummy? Have you been to a hocano before?”

“One of the most beautiful hocanoes you can ever see.”

I pulled out my album from my first ever backpacking adventure all those years ago when only print film was around. And together we stared at the photos of the most beautiful sunrise over the volcano Mt Semera , Mt Bromo and the surrounding craters.

We talked about the smoke billowing out of Mt Bromo and how it smells like rotten egg. And how mummy rode a horse to the base of Mt Bromo and then climbed up to the crater’s rim to peer inside.

She was fascinated and asked the question that she always does whenever we speak of any new place around the world

“Mummy can I go and see the hocano one day?”

“Absolutely.”

She wants to see the hocano picture all the time now from mummy’s big book and asks me the same questions, her thirst for knowledge insatiable.

Now I go to add sunrise over Mt Bromo to the ever growing list of things I must show my daughter of this beautiful world of ours.