Looking down into the crater, I saw nothing but endless miles of white-streaked dirt and rocks descending into a sea of smoke. But a few obligatory photos later, I saw what we came for. A strong, sulfur-infused wind lifted the fog, revealing at the bottom of the crater, the vast robins-egg-blue lake which put Mount Ijen in Lonely Planet's guide to Indonesia and brought me to the summit of the active volcano.
The lake, which sits on Ijen's summit, is superb and certainly worthy of any backpacker- lonely or not. But what emerged from the desolate crater (kawah) impressed me more. One by one, a man appeared over the cliff, carrying two baskets filled with hefty blocks of bright-yellow sulfur over his shoulders. I crept over the edge to see where these hardy miners were coming from but the path was too steep and whatever I would've been able to see was obscured in smoke. So, I went down.
Most of the men I passed on my way down looked about my height, but thinner. My hiking buddy pointed out that the upper backs of older men- which you could glimpse through their shirt collars- had been blackened from years of carrying the sulfur (usually 70 kilos at a time) over their shoulders. They wore worn and torn rubber boots. Perhaps these protected the mens' feet from getting wet, but I wondered if they could keep a man from slipping down the steep muddy mountain paths after one of Indonesia's regular downpours. I saw at least one worker in rubber flip flops.
As I carefully made my way down path, using hands and feet to keep from falling 500 meters or so into the crater, miners briskly passed me up and down the steep, rocky path , like mountain goats seemingly unaware of the danger of one misstep. I asked a couple if they were ever afraid, "Ngak, no!" they would respond with a smile, "Biasa,"- the usual.
When the sulfur wind picked up again, the men mining below still looked like small toys in a lemon-yellow, baby-blue world. The workers continued to pass, some with cotton cloths tied around their noses and mouths, but most directly facing the toxic wind, occasionally coughing and spitting. Despite burying my nose in my shirt, the sulfur chocked me and brought back that rattling cough I'd battled my first month living in Indonesia. My vision blurred, my eyes burned and my breath became wheezes. When my friend suggested we head back up, I took the opportunity to escape the suffocating crater. My last memory from climbing out of the crater was seeing a worker near the top casually smoking a cigarette.
When we emerged from the kawah and I had recaptured my breath, questions flooded my head, nagging me throughout the day. How do the workers come back every day? They're paid about $4 for each trip they make down into the crater and few men can make more than two. That's more than you can make as a farmer in East Java, but surely the dangers are greater. Why can't the companies using the sulfur (and no doubt, profiting) invest in their workers by making conditions safer? Where are the pulleys? The gas masks?
What is the value of one life?
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