Ijen

After our morning watching a volcano erupt it was time to visit a (hopefully) less violent one further along the island. The journey wasn’t a huge distance but thanks to the road being unsurfaced it took over 5 hours mostly travelling at about 5 miles an hour. When we arrived we paid about 14p each to sit in a volcanic hot spring for a while as there was not much else to do. We spent the evening in the company of about 8 or 9 huge rhino beetles, the largest being about 4 or 5 inches long. Despite their size they are as stupid as other insects and enjoy repeatedly flying into light bulbs until they fall to the ground with a loud clatter.

The next morning was our second pre-dawn start in a row, though this time it wasn’t so that we could see a sunrise so our failure to ever prepare wasn’t an issue. Breakfast was an interesting experience; jam and chocolate sprinkle sandwiches again surrounded by the stupid beetles. The walk to the top of the volcano was 3km and in that distance rose over 500m, i.e. steep.

Luckily the views from the path on the walk up were pretty incredible so we had an excuse to stop and nearly die every 2 minutes (travelling doesn’t do great things for fitness). 

When we finally reached the rim of the crater it was like arriving on another planet. Hard to really improve on pictures of this, not that they do justice to being there.

We decided that we should get a closer look at the vents lower in the crater (despite the many signs forbidding it). We followed the path down that the sulphur miners spend all day trekking up and down. Unfortunately halfway down the wind changed and we couldn’t make it any further in past the thick stench. To get a sense of scale look at the tiny dots that are the people around the vents, this was taken from halfway down the crater.

On the way back down we stopped to get a drink at what turned out to be the weigh station for the workers mining/harvesting the sulphur from the crater. We watched one of them getting their basket weighed; it came out at over 65kg and wasn’t one of the biggest loads we had seen!

One last thing, the hotel provided the best towels I have ever seen; featuring both Winnie the Pooh and Transformers!