Fire and brimstone

8th January

Now run by the Indonesian government, the coffee plantation where we stay employs over 500 people who all live in tied cottages in a small village surrounding the plantation house. Built by Dutch colonialists, the plantation house now serves as a guest house, but its former glory has definitely faded. Although our enormous rooms seem impressive at first sight, we quickly discover the awful reality of Catimoer Guest House – which was dirty, crawling with ants, unfolding the towels released a squadron of large flying insects, and we found the wings of many of these inside the bed, along with other long dead creepy crawlies. Our unimaginative dinner was cold as it been on the table for half an hour before anyone told us it was there, and consisted of vegetable soup, prawn crackers, steamed rice, noodles, potato croquets and tiny chicken drumsticks. Breakfast was even worse – a boiled egg and a sandwich of rancid butter and chocolate sprinkles. But the crowning glory of Catimoer is the complete lack of sound insulation as both the interior and exterior walls are latticed canework – you can see daylight through them. We went to bed listening to the TV lounge next door; thought someone was using our bathroom as you could hear their ablutions so clearly; and, to cap it all, were woken up a little before 4am by the village mosque calling the faithful to prayer and broadcasting the entire proceedings over the tannoy system for the next hour. Prayers over, work obviously started for the day as several lorries revved up and reversed into our room – at least that’s what it sounded like. But if you want to visit Mount Raing and see the turquoise lake within Ijen, its crater, there are very few accommodation options. Apparently, this is one of the best. Hmmm. But we are easily up for our 6.15am departure.

It takes about 4 hours to climb up the volcano, walk around the rim, down into the crater and back again. Fortunately, we still had a packet of chocolate biscuits and some rambutin (fruit) in the mini-bus, so we didn’t have to do it on an entirely empty stomach.

What’s unusual about Ijen is that it is an active sulphur mine. But though we knew this, nothing prepared us for the vision of hell that unfolded below us as we crested the rim of the crater. We had already encountered cheery sulphur miners carrying two baskets of yellow sulphur balanced on one shoulder. They sulphur looked like broken blocks of wall insulation but, as Robin and Tim found out when they tried to lift one, each load weighs between 65 and 85kg – which, even at the lighter weight, is about 10kg more than me. Essentially these guys were hauling the equivalent of me and my luggage for 3 months up from the crater and down to the bottom of the mountain two or three times a day. And for that they received the princely sum of 900 rupiah a kilogram – about £4 for each load.

We could barely see the famous turquoise lake from the top of the crater as it was covered by yellow, grey and white sulphurous plume spewing out of the crater. This is where the miners worked, and it would make a good set for a desolate planet in Dr Who. It took us a good 20 minutes to stumble down the rocky track inside the crater to the mine itself, I only managed it with the help of Katung, who has done it so many times before he knew which rocks were solid and which would shoot down the rock face if you tried to balance on them. The miners had to come up this with their load, even they found it tough, ironically pausing for a fag break along the way.

Once we reached the makeshift mine we could see that the vapour from the volcano was directed through a series of pipes so it condensed on exit and formed hard yellow sulphur on the rock. Some of the sulphur liquefied and turned red, forming strange shapes either naturally or with the help of the miners, which they sold to tourists for extra cash. Being a scientist, Robin was in his element. For me it was a scene of medieval hell, made worse by the often choking fumes. At one point on the trek back up we were enveloped, and despite the wet scarves over our mouths, the eye-watering fumes scorched the back or our throats.

To our Western eyes it looked as if it would be pretty easy to mechanise the process of hauling the sulphur up from the crater, and use donkeys, at least, to carry it down. But in a country with a population of 235 million and no social security, Katung argued that the work was needed. And so the men we saw will carry the sulphur until they drop – and do it willingly.

We were happy to walk – or rather gallop, same foot always forward – back down the steep mountain slope to our mini-bus for our final journey in Java, to the ferry that would take us over to Bali. Once across the narrow channel we entered a different world.