Ijen crater, more than stunning landscape

Ijen crater, more than stunning landscape

James Durston, Contributor, Banyuwangi, East Java

Sulfurous, volcanic crater Kawah Ijen, East Java, holds within
its steep walls one of the most hypnotic sights that Indonesia
offers the traveler -- a lake with an aqua-blue surface, smooth
like a mirror, cutting a vivid image across the sharpened gray
crags of the surrounding mountains, themselves backed by a clean,
electric sky.

As a handful of tourists stand surveying the crumbling slopes
and the intense color of the lake, they suddenly get a taste of
why the local people consider Ijen to be a living beast, as
capricious as any human, at once both awesome to behold and
terrible to endure. A cloud of sulfur gas is blown their way,
making them gag and choke, bringing tears to their eyes.

This sinister undercurrent, an evil streak that would deter
many from venturing even close to the volcano, is what draws
others. The same vicious smoke attracts an elite class of
hardened men -- Kawah Ijen's sulfur slaves.

These men work within inches of one of the most acidic lakes
in the world -- it has a pH value of 0.3 -- and collect what the
volcano rejects: pure sulfur. Every day the miners each gather up
to 200 kilograms (kg) of sulfur to sell to a refinery 18 km down
the road.

The journey from the bottom of the volcano to the edge of the
lake normally takes a tourist two-and-a-half hours, carrying
nothing more than a camera and a bottle of water. These men make
the same journey in half the time, several times a day, carrying
60 kg of sulfur each time.

Before a road was built connecting the volcano to the
refinery, they had to walk the entire 18 kilometers to the
refinery on foot.

Now life seems easy, and they appear to relish their
reputation as the hard men of East Java. One worker says, "If you
want to eat from the plate you must be willing to swallow the
food."

The miners can earn very good money compared with the majority
of farm workers in the area. A load of 60 kg will earn a miner Rp
30,000 (about US$3.40), so in a day a miner can earn around Rp
100,000. In comparison, fruit sellers earn as little as Rp 15,000
per day.

But the times of plenty are evaporating quickly. Guides to the
crater say it has been predicted the sulfur that the miners
collect will be significantly diminished within a year.

The smoke -- the "breath" of Ijen, as the miners call it -- is
what contains the sulfur. The miners use a network of pipes to
condense the gaseous sulfur, exceeding temperatures of 200
degrees Celsius, into its solid form, the recognizable, yellow
rubbery substance.

They then bundle the large lumps into wicker baskets that they
hoist onto their shoulders as they pace back down the mountain to
the weighing station. They also collect samples of the sulfur in
water bottles and sell the solidified stalagmites to tourists who
have come to see them work.

But the result of removing four tons to five tons of sulfur
each day ever since the mine opened in 1968, is that in less than
a year, the amount of sulfur collected will fall from about 200
kg per miner to about 5 kg. The refinery, which uses the sulfur
mainly to whiten sugar but also to produce medicines, paints and
explosives, will have to concentrate on other sources of revenue.
The miners will have to do the same, reverting to farming to earn
their living.

The work will be less arduous and far less health-threatening
-- miners who have worked the slopes of Ijen for some time suffer
from bad eyes, sore lungs, corroded teeth, plus a host of other
sinister symptoms brought on by the sulfur fumes -- but farming
also offers far more meager rewards. The change in lifestyle will
be a shock to many, and some are scared that they will not be
able to support their families.

"This work is not for humans, but if you can do it, you must do
it. In one year, when it finishes, they will have to farm, like
the other people," said Dori, a guide from the nearby town of
Probolinggo, who shows tourists up the precarious slope three
times a week.

This will not be as impossible as it seems at first, Dori
continues. After all, before Ijen there was only farming, mainly
for rice, but also for tobacco, food crops (palawija) and coffee,
and the people survived.

What will be difficult will be converting from a lifestyle
where you work for just a few months of the year, a few weeks at
a time, for extremely good money, to working every day of the
year for negligible sums.

Wayan is one of the men that work on Ijen. He looks 45 but is
probably no older than 30. His skin is dark brown and stretched
taut over his small frame. A small mound of scar tissue on his
shoulder can be seen under the wooden yoke that connects his two
baskets.

Incredibly, he spends most of his time working at a point on
the crater where the smoke billows relentlessly from the ground
and surrounds him like a cloak. He scrapes the solidified sulfur
into manageable chunks with a shovel and pours buckets of water
over the red, molten sulfur to keep control of the near-invisible
fires that burst into life erratically. Dante could not have
imagined a more terrifying place when he conceived of his Seventh
Circle of Hell.

Like most of the men who work on Ijen, he is philosophical
about the loss of his livelihood, saying, "It's OK that there is
no more sulfur. I have my father's farm, and anyway, Ijen needs
to rest. If the volcano sleeps, then we are safe."

But Kawah Ijen is not yet dead. Murmurs of life are recorded
every few years, when the lake bubbles and changes color, and
large eruptions, where mud, smoke and molten sulfur are thrown
hundred of meters into the air, were recorded as recently as
1952.

The fact that the diminishing supplies of sulfur will mean the
miners will not have to expose themselves to these hazards is of
limited benefit, for it is hard to say which is worse for the
health: sulfur or poverty.