Ijen Revisited

Kawah Ijen is not a place to be entered lightly and should you venture into its crater, you will pass signs that warn of its unforgiving nature. It is a compelling place. Perhaps not for those men who mine the sulphur by the shore of Ijen's acid lake, but for me and others like me. Addiction to volcanoes can be a dangerous, sometimes fatal thing, but so can smoking cigarettes or crossing the road. I don't go out of my way to flirt with danger, but I do have moments.

I walked carefully between familiar crags and gullies of grey tephra encrusted with a dulled crust of powdery yellow. I had been here before. Some of the miners were up near the pipes—knuckled lengths of cast iron—that conducted Ijen's acrid breath, condensing it into miniature pools of liquid sulphur. Billowing steam and gas coursed from the pipes and cracks in the jaundiced rocks, tweezed and pulled by a fickle wind. It was not a good day to be in the crater, not just for me, but for anyone. Wherever I went the breeze followed, carrying with it a wall of impenetrable and unbreathable gas. It was ironic that this toxic antagonist, that I struggled to avoid like the plague, was the very thing that made Kawah Ijen such a unique place. It was the composition and constant nature of the volcanoes gasses that brought a daily supply of fresh sulphur to the surface. There was nothing high-tech about Ijen's mining operation, in fact it could scarcely be called mining—quarrying would be more accurate—but in reality neither word adequately describes the daily hardship and danger endured by the men here.

The previous evening had been little better with Ijen's gaping mouth hung with a sepia haze that wheeled silently from the fumaroles. I had arrived at the Pondok—a small building used by some of the miners to eat and sleep in— a few hours before, in order to meet up with an English friend who'd come to Ijen to make a documentary on the miners. We had caught up with each other only briefly as he was in the midst of filming. So I took the opportunity to walk the final Kilometre or so from the Pondok to the crater's edge. The view was as breathtaking as I had remembered it from two years before, yet somehow different too. More sombre. As though twilight had cast a spell upon the rocks and clouds, painting them in ghostly shades. As ever, Kawah Ijen's crater had a hot acid lake at its heart, and by its edge—some 200 metres below the rim—moved tiny figures silhouetted against drifts of yellowed mist.

I remembered from my first visit here how struck I'd been at the contrast between this distant, godly view and the painful reality for the miners within. Things usually change in character as their distance alters. Things that are invisible from afar become resolved as we draw closer, but it is not only appearance that changes. Things that are safe at a distance can also become very dangerous if we venture too close. The miners of Kawah Ijen had no option but to go right into the volcano in order to gather sulphur— prising the precious element from the grey rock with lengths of iron and calm resolve. Their calmness belied the great effort of their toil. Gathering the sulphur within restricting, poisonous vapour was arduous enough, but this hardship is actually only a prelude to their real effort and pain. The sulphur—often still warm with an ancient heat—had then to be carried out of the crater and down its flank's. loads averaging 80kg or more were packed into sacks and woven baskets before being shouldered up to the crater's rim on flexing bamboo yokes. A load that most could scarcely lift at all, let alone walk with. It was an occupation that had to be seen to be believed.

In the dimming light there were still quite a few men at the bottom of the crater, working the pipes, while several more were slowly making their way up the steep, winding path with their loads. It was while I was looking at these men that an orangey flicker caught my eye near the fumaroles. It seemed to be flames—the colour of molten lava—glowing amongst the crags. I watched the fire for a few minutes as it danced back and forth across the rocks, before curiosity finally got the better of me. I had to get a closer look to find out just what this odd phenomena was. I made a few quick calculations in my head that went something along the lines of—"there's about an hour of light left, that's ten minutes down at a trot and thirty back out, leaving twenty minutes to investigate at a push"—I would be fine. Two minutes later I slowed to a stop fifty metres below the rim to let one of the miners pass before continuing down. On the path it was the miners on their way out with sulphur who had the right of way, their effort dictated this as surely as gravity sought to hold them back.

The gasses were drifting up to my left now, even though a few minutes before they had been rising to the right—perhaps this was not such a good idea after all. Even so, at the speed the fumes were moving I would have time to beat a hasty retreat in time to avoid the thickest fumes nearest the pipes. So I slowly moved across the rocks towards the fire. I stopped about five metres away from flickering deep orange and blue flames that jumped between one point and another, below two of the pipes. The sulphur that saturated the porous rock had somehow caught fire and was burning across an area of ten square metres or so. I had always assumed that the few men who worked the pipes, keeping the sulphur flowing for the other miners, were in someway helping the condensation process by throwing buckets of water over the pipes to cool them. It hadn't occurred to me that they were putting fires out, because I had only been to Ijen in bright sunshine. Any fires would have been virtual invisible to the untrained eye. Yet clearly that is what they had been doing and of course it made perfect sense too. Sulphur is flammable and as such any fires had to be doused before they grew too large.

I spent a bit of time by the lake photographing the shoreline which apparently had risen and fallen often, with each drop leaving a yellow tide line of small sulphur bubbles. I was not looking forward to the climb out, not because of the ascent, but because the gas often swept from crater in the same direction as the only path in and out. By now, visibility was fading fast and I really didn't want to get caught in a gas cloud if I could help it—not without a gasmask and certainly not in worsening light. It was time to climb out.

The miners did this trip once or twice, and on rare occasion even three times, a day, with more than my body weight on their shoulders—loads so heavy that after a time their feet become uncommonly wide with broad, splayed toes.

Today, each miner's load had to be weighed near the Pondok, before it could be carried down a steep forested track to a second weigh point. Here the path ended by the road, which had turned mining at Ijen into something a little less like torture. Before the road, miners had had to carry their loads all the way to the refinery on foot. A seemingly impossible task when you consider that the refinery is some18 kilometres from the crater. Now the miners had only to carry their loads about 3 kilometres to the second weigh station, where they are paid cash in hand according to the amount they have carried that day.

Back at the Pondok I soon found myself sat with a group of miners and the film crew, eating and talking about life on and off Ijen. I had brought some of the photographs taken on my last visit and showing them to some of the miners, asked if any of the men in the pictures still worked in the crater. As it turned out, one of them did and he was right here, resting in one of the large huts, by the weigh station. A few minutes latter we had found him and at last I was able to give back something that I had taken more than two years earlier. We talked on for a time, huddled round a small fire lit on the blackened clay floor. The warmth had been welcome, but the smoky air began eventually to make my head spin.

The night had been cold and damp, and huddled with the film crew in the Pondok, it had also been sleepless. Ijen is just south of the equator, but don't let that fool you—at night its often bitter. Warmth had only returned to my body in the small hours, thanks to a marvellously hot meal of fish and rice—just the ticket for a dawn walk into a volcano.

An hour later I was back in the crater where conditions had not improved. They were so bad in fact that my friends soundman had flatly refused to go into the crater at all. I had spent the time split between taking photographs and helping the miners try out some of the gasmasks I'd brought from home. I also tried fastidiously to avoid the gasses.

It seemed as though things were going pretty well, at the time, with conditions ideal for some atmospheric shots. The gasmasks were also proving to be a great success, with all the miners who tried them giving them the thumbs up. The idea had been to see if the masks would cope with the conditions, and if so to find a way of getting more of them supplied to the miners on an ongoing basis. The problem was that the filters were clogging up very fast indeed. So much so, that for the masks to remain effective, they would have to be changed every day.

I was considering the problem, when a sudden swing of the wind landed me right in the heart of the thickest mass of gas I had ever seen. At that moment I remember saying to myself "okay don't panic just crouch low and breath through your T-shirt" the same course of action had worked well enough two years ago when I last found myself enveloped. "In just a few seconds," I thought, "The wind will change again and I'll be in the clear". Soon though, it began to feel as though the gas was never going to part again. I was in real trouble this time. I squinted my eyes open trying to stare through the tears and the yellow haze, to somehow find a way out, to stay conscious, to stay alive. I dropped to my knees, head spinning—I was slowly suffocating and no one could see me to help. In desperation I yelled as loudly as I could, hoping that someone, somehow could and would come to my aid. In all reality I had shouted with my last breath and now, in the silence, I waited for what seemed an eternity. I opened my eyes and somehow managed to scrambled to my feet in one last effort to find a way out—but the gasses seamed thicker and darker than ever. I felt sure that I was going to die, I had come here with the knowledge that volcanoes sometimes take lives, and now I was to become another statistic. It was then, when all seemed lost, that the ghostly figures of not one but two miners calmly walked into view and took me firmly by the arm. Without so much as a word, they lead me along a short, labyrinthine path, down towards the lake. Here, as swiftly as I had been entombed, the gasses parted, and I found myself walking towards my friend. Later, he would tell me how shocked he had been to see anyone at all emerge from—what had seemed—a solid wall of fumes. In my embarrassment, all I had said was "has anyone got a mask as I'm feeling a wee bit out of breath". I knew that I'd been careless and stupid, and I also new that I'd been incredibly lucky. I owed my life to the two miners, but when I turned to thank them, they had vanished. As it happened, it was another miner who had been wearing my gasmask at the time, trying it out to see how it helped working right at the mouth of the pipes.

It wasn't as though I'd come into the crater unprepared, I new the risks and had taken three gas masks in that day, one for me another for Sony—my guide and interpreter— and the third for some of the miners to try. It was just bad luck that the one time I really needed one, they were all being used by someone else. The miners believe that if you make too much noise the smoke will follow you, but I hadn't shouted or been loud at all, until I yelled for someone to save my life. In retrospect I think all I can honestly say is that sometimes these things happen—and that's all there is to it—except that next time, perhaps I'll bring a fourth mask.