Inside Ijen crater

After more than 14 hours on a train that left Yogjiakarta at around 6.30am, we finally arrived to our improvised Airbnb in Banyuwangi late at night. After a quick street food based dinner, ready to go to sleep, we were told we were actually right on time to start hiking Ijen crater. We woke up at 4 am that day to catch the train and none of us had slept throughout the trip. Still, it sounded like a reasonable idea to start the hike after a fast shower. The Airbnb host arranged a guide for us that we met in front of the house few minutes later. The adventure began.

The guide, who couldn’t speak a word of english, drove us to the bottom of the volcano, where the hike to the crater started. We arrived there at half past midnight and the plan was to get into the crater before 2 am, or the morning light would have been too strong for us to see the blue flames produced by the burning sulfur. Pitch black was needed to witness the flames in all their beauty and we couldn’t miss it. Therefore we started hiking fast. So fast that we easily caught up with people who started the hike probably half an hour before us. Since our guide couldn’t keep up the pace, we left him behind and stopped to wait for him only when we reached the point on top of the volcano where we could feel the sulfur fumes starting to intoxicate us. Once the guide reached us, we put on the gas masks and started to climb down the crater, all the way to the bottom.

The dark night was filled with stars, rocks all around us, headlights of other tourists scattered along the crater and metres high blue flames burning whilst lighting up the side of the crater, revealing the yellow sulfur. It was magical.

Lying on the ground few meters from the flames and the sulfur, we stared at the flames until the first light of the morning appeared.

At that point, a whole new sight opened up in front of our eyes.

The flames were not visible anymore and their blue colour was substituted by a much wider palette of colours. The pink of the sky, the incredibly bright yellow of the sulfur, the blue of the acidic lake filling the crater that we had just noticed, even though we had been laying for hours no more than a couple hundred meters from it. At around 5.30 am we started our ascent to the top of the crater, before descending the volcano itself to go back to Banyuwangi and to try to get some sleep after the long hike.

Right next to us, the sulfur worker were ascending the crater as well, carrying baskets filled with sulfur with a total weight of around 90 kg. Some of them challenged us to try to pick up the basket, but we miserably failed. We couldn’t possibly compete with them. Even more impressive though is that they were doing the hour and a half long vertical ascend wearing flip-flops and no gas mask. Also, they had been working to extract the sulfur for the most part of the night before dawn came. I believe the photographs shows better than I can with words how tough is their everyday job routine.

The view from the top of the volcano was also a stunner, as we found ourself surrounded by numerous volcanos.