Ticket for the Long Way Round

Today is the first day in almost three weeks I haven’t been royally ripped off on transport. I catch a taxi to the airport, fly to Denpasar, take an ojek (motorbike taxi; aka random dude on a motorbike) to a local bus station, and sit myself on a bus bound via road and ferry to Banyuwangi, a port town on the near end of East Java. A promised four-hour transfer ends up taking close to seven and a half, and by the time the driver drops me off far past my accommodation, I’ve been in transit for over 13 hours.

I shoulder my backpack and start walking. Not too long thereafter, a car pulls over and several hands wave out the window: it’s a family I bonded with as we watched ferries dancing in currents and swell (and the brothers teased their seasick little sister) on the crossing from Bali to Java. (Seriously, its no wonder the boats here have a reputation for sinking.) The family reorganizes their entire car, gives me the front seat, turns around and delivers me straight to my home stay’s courtyard. 

They are absolute saviours at the end of the day. We never learn each other's names.

We leave for Mt. Ijen just after midnight, in a big, bright blue jeep. (apparently once upon a time, the tourist authority required everyone to have jeeps to access Ijen. Then roads got better, but since everyone had spent so much money on pretty jeeps, you're still required to pay to make the ride in one.) We arrive to a chaotic hoard teeming around the trailhead to a volcano shrouded in cloud. We collect gas masks and our (required) guide conveniently disappears about five meters past the entry gate: not exactly a huge issue, considering literally thousands of people are making the hike next to us. Some of the bigger, fatter people actually pay three guys with a cart to wheel them up the mountain rather than walking their asses to the crater.

We hike upward through the clouds, and the mist clears as we reach the crater rim. Under the night sky we descend steep, crumbling rock into the crater to the edge of an acid lake, where pipes redirect molten sulfur ore out of the mountain. Sulfur gas swells forth and blazes in dancing deep blue flame when it meets the atmosphere. Miners enter blinding clouds to collect the mineral as it cools, splitting and piling blocks high into woven baskets suspended from bamboo poles to be carried up the crater and carted down the mountain. No less than 60 kilograms; sometimes more than 100, my host, Yofie, later tells me. They sell it for IDR 1,000 ($.08) a kilogram, to Chinese companies who make cosmetics.

We return to the crater rim and wander around its edge amongst dead trees, which give way to lush ferns as the mountain’s peak rises a short way above us.  The sun rises over an opaque, turquoise-green caldera lake cradled in a sheer gray bowl. (Occasionally, word has it, the lake bubbles as poison gas rises from the center of the volcano.) Deep, jagged striations pattern a smaller bowl, stained gray-yellow, breaking the crater’s contour above the sulfur cloud where it escapes the volcano. As the sun breaks, morning light hits the mountains to our west, illuminating a cloudbank beneath us as it butts up against the mountains from the south. To our north the clouds clear, revealing deep, green jungled valleys.

At some point in the early afternoon between fried noodles and naps at the guesthouse, a camera crew makes an appearance. Apparently Banyuwangi has a program that helps people in hospitality to learn English, and Yofie's aunt is one of the people for whom the program has been life-changing. And so I find myself describing volcanos covered in snow to my hosts, and apparently I then end up on national TV.

... all in a good day's work.
__________

The next day’s journey west is only slightly easier than that from Lombok to Java.

Yofie’s uncle drops me at the train station, and I pass the next four hours watching towns and rice paddies fly by from my six-dollar, executive class, reclining seat outfitted with electric outlets. I leave the train at Probolinggo, a busy, unattractive port town on Java’s northeast coast, where the driver of a miniature, yellow open-air truck charges me twice the regular price to bash through afternoon traffic and take me to the “bus station.” On the way he stops in front of a tourist office, where a dude pokes his head into the bema. “You go to Cemoro Lawang?” he asks us. “You go to Bromo? You get out here! You go to bus station, you wait long time!” And if I get out here, you get a commission. And I get put on the exact same bus anyway, for twice the price.

He takes us to the bus station.

An hour and a half later, we cram 15 people into a minibus and begin driving. We climb and climb and climb a one-lane road that tilts and teeters on the mountain’s edge alongside vegetable farms that plunge down slopes on angles greater than 50 degrees. We stall no fewer than four times before we break through the cloud and arrive in Cemoro Lawang. The little town perches at 7,500 ft on the edge of the Tengger massif’s broad caldera, overlooking a barren sea of sand and volcano piled on top of volcano within the moonlike crater’s 10-kilometer span. The mountain on which I stand is so massive I don’t even realize where I am until I pull up a zoomed-out image on Google Map’s satellite view.

In any case, I wake up at 2:30 am the next day and leave behind my guesthouse (with my sunken bed, universally unlocking padlock, and lacking a single functioning sink in the building) for the freezing-ass cold alpine night. I hike and scramble through jungle to one of the highest overlooks onto Tengger’s crater, waiting for the sun from a slightly precarious hillside perch in front of a crowded tourist railing.

Low mist wraps villages and farms nestled amongst deep green hills, spreading downward to veil the sandy expanse surrounding Bromo in the pre-dawn. Mt. Semeru, Java’s highest volcano, burps steam from behind Bromo as the sun rises, clearing mist and washing deep pink light onto the broken contours of Bromo’s frozen ash flows.

A nap and a half later, in the company of a pair of fellow travelers from Seattle, I locate and follow the badly guarded secret of a small, steep track downward from Cemoro Lawang to the Sea of Sand, stepping onto the bare expanse and bypassing the park’s exorbitant entry fee. Wind lifts veils of dust and devils swirl as we cross toward Bromo, passing a small, lonely temple built in honor of the volcano. We bypass stalls selling flowers to chuck into the crater (for good luck!) and climb the volcano’s steep gray slope, accompanied by a growing low rumble. Wind picks up and the rumble crescendos to a jet’s deafening roar as we crest the crater’s rim, a constant tremble under our feet.

It’s like I’ve stepped onto a living moon, peering into its slow-burning core from a razor’s edge. Steep, dark slopes plunge into the broad maw in front of me. Sulfer-tainted steam coils to rise from a round, vertical shaft, hissing forth from a pool the color of green poison control warnings and leaving a vibrant mustard-yellow smudge behind to color the cavern’s far side. A faint acrid tinge permeates the atmosphere. Small bunches of bright flowers left upon a miniature shrine, wilting under the day’s heat, break the mountain’s utter desolation within its cluster of similarly colored peaks, bereft of life. And yet, despite its desolation, I find myself in one of the most beautiful, mindbending places I’ve ever experienced.

I sit a while, munching on a pear as the mountain roils beneath me. Then our motley crew descend Bromo's slope, I introduce the boys to the art of properly bartering for a motorbike taxi, we return to Tengger Crater’s green edge, and then we continue down the mountain to the world of bemas and trains once more.