The scene was straight out of a Hieronymus Bosch painting. A line of workers in black rubber boots struggled up a steep trail that emerged from the volcanic crater of Mount Ijen on the Indonesian island of Java. On their shoulders, each carried a pole with two baskets of bright yellow chunks of sulfur that had been hacked out of a rock wall near the crater lake.
Step by step, the laborers, some carrying 90kg, trudged up to a point directly below the 2,799m summit. Other workers would soon take the loads and walk 3km down the slope. Eventually the sulfur would be sold to Indonesian companies that use it to make medicine and other products. For their efforts, the 400 or so workers are paid US$0.31 per kilogram of sulfur. Day after day they do this, inhaling sulfur fumes, the stench of rotten eggs clinging to them.
My wife, Tini, and I started down the trail toward the crater, along with a few other travelers who had come with us to this plateau in eastern Java.
“The workers start at dawn and have to stop by 1pm,” said Alim, our guide, who chose to wait at the top. “The fumes get to be too much, even for them.” His warning to us: Be aware of the fumes and climb back up soon, or feel the wrath of the volcano.
Flirting with the fury of a volcano may not sound like the usual tourist fare, but in recent years, these imperious volcanoes have become an increasingly popular draw that is away from the crowded resorts of Bali, which lies just east of Java. Last year, more than 93,000 people visited Bromo-Tengger-Semeru National Park, Indonesia’s most famous volcano preserve, up 78 percent from the previous year, according to the park’s ranger station. (Numbers had fallen earlier this decade after terrorist bombings in Bali.) Several high-end hotels have opened in recent years, catering to volcano tourism, including Ijen Resort and Villas, which lies among rice fields to the east of Mount Ijen.
Exploring Mount Ijen and the other volcanoes that form the spine of Java offers travelers a chance to understand how geology has so deeply influenced the lives and culture of the people who reside in the highlands. Over the centuries, eruptions have buried villages, destroyed farmland and filled the air with black haze, contributing to the ancient belief that the volcanic gods must be appeased.
Watching the sulfur workers toil on Mount Ijen is one way for visitors to experience the role Java’s volcanic landscape plays in the modern day-to-day lives of locals. Across Java, there are opportunities to appreciate the sheer physical beauty of the volcanoes: spectacular vantage points from which to watch the sun rise above the lava-spewing peaks, and trails where hardy travelers can trek across the lunar-like terrain or right up to the maw of some of the most active cones.
To properly explore the volcanic landscape, a west-to-east traverse of the island made sense to us, starting at the ancient temple of Borobudur, which lies in the shadow of two volcanoes, and ending on the far side of Java in the crater of Mount Ijen.
Borobudur, the sprawling stone monument that was completed by Mahayana Buddhists in the ninth century, is ringed by rice fields where people farm as they did centuries ago. The monument, said to have been built from two million stones, is a mandala made to reflect the order of the cosmos.
The nearby volcanoes have shown little mercy to Borobudur. After nearby Mount Merapi erupted centuries ago, the temple lay beneath ash until it was cleared in 1815, when Sir Thomas Stamford Raffles governed Java for the British Empire.
At dawn, we walked from our simple guesthouse in the rice fields to the base of Borobudur. The monument has five square platforms topped by three circular ones, each adorned with bas-reliefs depicting religious episodes and scenes from the Buddha’s life. The statues of Buddha at the top gaze out serenely at the perfect cones of the two nearby volcanoes, Merapi and Mount Merbabu.
Smoke trailed from the cone of Merapi, signaling that it was still active. Among the Javanese, it is widely feared — having erupted dozens of times in the last century — and guidebooks advise travelers to check with local authorities before trying to climb to its 2,910m summit. Early the next morning, Golan, a worker at our guesthouse, took us to a point atop a hill where we could see the sun rise over Mount Merapi. The jungle lay before us, the mandala of Borobudur in the center. A thick mist rose skyward from the trees, the moisture of night burning off. We had considered hiking up Merapi overnight, but were warned that the trail could be treacherous in the rainy season.
The drive to Mount Bromo, the most-visited volcano on Java, took a full day. Our driver took us along the west slope of Mount Lawu, an inactive volcano, and we stopped at Candi Sukuh, a temple that seemed to have been the house of worship for a fertility cult — stone statues with gargantuan genitalia stood on the grounds. In the afternoon it stormed, and rain was still falling by the time we arrived at Cemoro Lawang, the gateway village to Mount Bromo.
The village stands on the edge of a vast caldera, the cradle of two other volcanic peaks that rise from an otherworldly sand sea at the floor of the caldera. Gazing across the landscape is like staring out at the surface of the moon. Smoke still curled up from the crater of Bromo, at 2,390m. I could see how this stark environment would inspire worship from the Tenggerese, the highland locals. Those who lived in Cemoro Lawang are Hindus, a minority in Muslim-dominated Java. They had even built a Hindu temple in the sand sea, at the foot of Bromo.
At the ranger station in Cemoro Lawang, I met Retno Suratri, a graduate student in anthropology at the University of Indonesia who was studying the Tenggerese.
“They have so many rituals related to Mount Bromo,” she said. “They believe their ancestors came from there. They’re willing to spend lots of money on their rituals, even more so than other people in Indonesia.”
That seemed to be a properly respectful attitude for people who live with the daily possibility of wholesale destruction. Every year, the Tenggerese appease the spirits of the volcano by tossing vegetables, chicken and money into the maw during the Kasada festival, according to one guidebook. A trail leads across the sand to the Hindu temple, and then up steps to the lip of Bromo. It is an hour’s walk, mostly across soft earth. The end brings you face to face with the abyss: a drop straight down into a white, sulfuric haze.
We spent six hours hiking that day. The parts of the caldera floor beyond the sand sea were carpeted with grass and swaying reeds, like an African savannah. Locals rode their motorbikes on the dirt paths as they shuttled between Cemoro Lawang and towns on the far side of the caldera.
At 3:30 the next morning we left our hotel. The plan was to hike three hours to the highest point on the caldera rim to watch the sunrise. But as we started off with Tris, our Tenggerese guide, we felt drops of rain. Tini said it was a bad idea to press ahead. Tris agreed. The downpour began when we got back into bed. It was just another rainstorm, but it seemed to underscore the unpredictable nature of exploring these volcanoes. Our hikes were not tough, but there were risks. While we were in Indonesia, a Swedish hiker died during a fall on Mount Batur, a well-touristed volcano in Bali. Tris said it best: “You have to respect the environment and keep both eyes open.”
I took a tumble myself, hiking up from the turquoise crater lake of Mount Ijen, as the sulfur clouds were starting to thicken in mid-morning. It was the last stop for us in Java. We had spent an hour inside the crater watching miners with goggles and gas masks hack out sulfur with pickaxes as fumes belched from the yellow rocks.
We had only bandannas to cover our mouths. When the wind blew the sulfur clouds in our direction, some travelers began coughing. We started up. A few minutes along, I stepped on a loose rock and tumbled down the steep crater.
I landed on a slope, my jaw slamming into a rock and blood spraying from my mouth. My arms and legs were covered in cuts. Worst of all, my right ankle was badly sprained. A miner helped me up. I managed to limp up to the crater lip, passing a worker who was coughing wildly, then hobbled 3km to the trailhead.
My jaw was still bleeding when we drove away. My ankle throbbed. Behind us, hunched miners stepped off the trail and dropped their baskets of sulfur in the clearing, then turned to head back up the volcano.
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