One for the Road: Volcano blues

Even as I write these opening words, already I have the uneasy feeling that completing this column is going to require an act of conjuring rather than composition.

Sleep deprived and suffering from a possible case of mild sulphur poisoning, I do not know if I have the mental wherewithal to pull a rabbit out of the hat this week.

Instead, it might be a matter of dropping the bucket into the well and seeing what comes out. And hopefully, with a bit of help from the old subconscious, it will be something drinkable!

Let’s start with an image: I am currently starboard on a ferry, lying with my upper back and shoulders against the cabin wall, the rest of my half-dead body (or half-living cadaver, whichever you prefer) sprawled out on the deck.

The sun is blasting my eyes, which are red and puffy, as though recently pepper-sprayed. My clothes, which I have not changed in 31 hours and counting, are stained and streaked with luminous substances that look like they could leapfrog a perfectly healthy man straight to very serious illness just by looking at them.

Suffice to say, I am a sorry, yet too vile to be pitied, sight.

Last night I got out of my bed at 11.30pm and boarded a small bus that took us to a volcano about an hour from where we were staying. For those interested, it picked us up in Banyuwangi, East Java, Indonesia and deposited us at the foot of Mount Ijen – a volcano known for its blue flame, acidic crater lake and intensive, rudimentary sulphur mining operation.

On that note: Using a plank of wood with two large baskets fastened at either side, these miners, many of whom we seen in action, carry 70 kilogram loads of sulphur rock out of the volcano – which, I should point out, is active, but not in a lava-spewing way. Each man is responsible for quarrying and transporting his own load. The going rate, according to our guide, is about ten cents per kilogram. The average labourer manages to extract three loads per day. Their working conditions are magnitudes bleaker than anything I have ever seen.

It’s hot, the work is slavishly hard, and, while we in the west might complain that the atmosphere at work is ‘toxic’, here it literally is.

Thankfully though, due to tourism, many of the miners have pivoted away from life in the pit, pimped their old wheelbarrows out with cushions and pillows, and now make a much more lucrative living pushing ill, unfit and downright lazy visitors up and down the summit.

A light person can pay as little as £150, while a more robust passenger could be looking at anything up to £400. Unfortunately, there just aren’t enough well-fed white people to go around, so many local boys and men still work in the mine, spending their days pretending that their plastic gas masks will protect their lungs from the toxic fumes that billow from the earth and form an ever-present cloud of poison inside the crater. While the masks might help, the reality remains: Years in the mine mean years off your life.

I have just felt the sudden impulse to make an admission. This column was initially supposed to be all about how tired I am after doing a big hike and having a night of no sleep, and how my mind feels unmoored from my usual column-writing state of consciousness.

Essentially, it was going to be a comical self-pitying session. However, after actually summing up the existence of the miners, that not only feels comically infeasible but also weirdly perverse.

While my mental faculties are not 100 per-cent, they are not sufficiently diminished to think it would be appropriate to end this whole thing with a stupid comment about a few hours by the sulphur has imbued me with an unholy pong of rotten eggs that might take months to shake.

This, however, does still seem kind of funny:

Guess what the name of our 19 year-old tour guide was… Eggy.