Mount Ijen
After our journey from Bali it was about 3pm before we had checked into our accommodation for our first night in Java.
I’m blaming island life for our complete lack of planning, but we hadn’t even looked at a guide site for Java, only googled the top ten things to see! It transpired that you could take a tour to one of the sites, Mt Ijen from the town we were in. The only problem was it left at midnight to allow time to climb it before sunrise. So instead for a nice dinner, a beer, and an early night, we were booked on to leave at midnight.
The temperature in Java was hotter than Bali, around 35 Celsius, so when the tour agent told us you needed to wrap up. It was a little hard to get your head around wearing a scarf, hat, warm coat, and long trousers. The long trousers was a step too far for me, and myself and Richard were about the only ones in shorts, glad I’d packed a woolly hat though.
After a bus journey we arrived at 2am to the base camp and got ready for the 2-3 hour climb up the volcano. Any thoughts of having any sort of life affirming moment all alone on top of the world were quickly dismissed when the guide told us there would be 700 people climbing that morning.
The path for the 2.5 mile journey up the volcano had been man made and was not the rocky path I thought we would be taking, but it was steep, very steep in parts! It was also pitch black so you could only see the ground in front of you and all the head touches flashing in the night sky.
When we reached the summit (about 2500ft) we had to start the descent into the volcano. This brought home the reality that we were actually on an active volcano. You could smell the sulphur and miners were lugging chunks of sulphur rock up the steep rocky path — past all of the tourists — from the mine at the bottom of the volcano’s inner core.
Luckily we got to the summit ahead of most of the 668 other people and when looking back up from inside the volcano there was a little trail of lights heading down the path.
The plumes of sulphur became bigger the closer you got to the bottom of the volcano, we were told to get our gas masks on, not sure how safe this all was…
At the very bottom the sulphur washed over you and it was hard to breathe even through the mask, and what I hadn’t expected was how it burnt your eyes. The ‘blue fire’ which we had climb down to see was a smallish river of gases that spontaneously flamed up as they ran down the rock giving off a blue flame.
The guide then told us it was time to start the long climb up, out of the mouth of the volcano and back to its summit, as it would be getting light soon, up the same narrow rocky path where people were still climbing down.
About halfway up the path, behind us the lake started to appear ( I didn’t even know it was there when we were at the bottom as it was so dark)
As the light increased the colours of the lake and surrounding landscape just came to life, truly breathtaking.
We had about an hour to explore around the top of the volcano before it was time to leave.
But not before an Instergram moment, which I didn’t find too comfortable as you can tell
So the long journey began, which was more tricky than the accent. The path was very slippery with loose earth and as the angle was so steep everyone was sliding and trying not to fall over.
Eventually back at base camp, thankfully no broken bones from the trek down, and time for deep fried bananas.
Well worth the loss of a night’s sleep.
