Marching Into An Active Volcano With The Sulfur Miners Of Ijen, Indonesia – by Mark Johanson (International Business Times – March 11 2014)

http://www.ibtimes.com/

“You lost sir? Follow us.”

Two men emerge from the dark beside me like a mirage, puffing clove cigarettes and twirling large bamboo shoulder baskets over their heads. Their names, they say, are Addis and Sukarno, and they will show me the path into Ijen crater.

It’s a few minutes after 4 a.m., and not five minutes earlier, my “English-speaking guide,” [who didn’t speak a lick of English], had dropped me at a grassy knoll in this remote corner of East Java’s puffing interior with one less-than-illuminating instruction: “walking.” With that, he pointed along a line perpendicular to the road and drove off.

The facts about the path ahead, as I know them, are as follows: The long walk into Ijen crater will include sharp drops, slippery steps and a toxic lake that claimed the life of a French backpacker a few years ago. At 2,600 meters (8,530 feet), Ijen is also a working mine where men carry up to 100 kilos (220 pounds) of sulfur by hand out of the noxious crater and down the volcano’s outer slopes to a weigh station as many as three times a day, six days a week.

Addis and Sukarno are two of those men.

Addis explains that he and about 300 other sulfur miners make the 3.5-kilometer (2.2-mile) trek into Ijen’s smoky abyss each day to bring up as much mustard-yellow sulfur as their backs can bear. In exchange for this bone-crunching work, Addis, Sukarno and the others can expect to earn between $10 and $15.

Daybreak sends cotton-candy clouds dancing across the volcanic peaks of Ijen Plateau in hues of pink and purple. In this surreal early morning light, the full scale of Ijen’s sulfur mining operation finally comes into view.

It’s a sight reminiscent of the early 1990s computer game “Lemmings.” Men march one-by-one along the lip of Ijen crater, file down a perilous path into the steam-covered chasm, break up sulfur into basket-size chunks and march the yellow gold back up the vertical path away from the crater’s milky green lake.

This work plays out against a hellish landscape bisected by a heavenly lagoon. Yet, Ijen’s crater belies a sinister secret: It’s the largest acidic lake on planet earth with a pH of 0.5 [similar to battery acid].

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