The land of a thousand ways of suffering

Translation courtesy of Dario Fioravanti

It was the year 1994 and I was 16, when a remote African country virtually unknown to South Americans suddenly echoed in the news. I must say that almost nothing is published about Africa in my country, so I barely remember that moment, but what I do remember is that it was a new tragic story coming from the black continent (after all, bad news is all we hear from Africa). What I did not know until much later in my life was the magnitude of the tragedy that was taking place in Rwanda in those days, which made it unavoidable to get to this tiny country with a picture of deep grief.

Getting to the city

Once completed our journey through the volcanoes, we wanted to get to Java as fast as possible. Java, with the exception of the spectacular east of the island, is where the majority of the population of the country lives, and in a country of 200 million people, that is not a minor thing. Java is badly overcrowded. In this aspect, Java reminded me very much of the Philippines where hardly 1 km would go by without people or settlements. Java also contains most of the country's industries; therefore traffic and pollution are extremely high. Finally, after 3 months and more than 4000km of cycling in rural and remote Indonesia, we had come to the big cities. 

Into the lungs of hell

The sulphur miners of the Ijen volcano, in the easternmost point of Java, carry out still in the 21st century, one of the most unhealthy and inhuman jobs in the world. The job involves descending into the crater of the active volcano which is constantly releasing immeasurable amounts of sulphur fumes, to crack by hand, the sulphur rocks that form on the surface, product of the chemical reactions of the sulphur coming in contact with the oxygen. Once they have enough rocks, they load them into their baskets which are then loaded onto their shoulders to carry them all the way up to the storage point, where the rocks are sold to the ones that will later sell them to the big companies. 

In the ring of fire

 With such limited time as 4 months to visit Indonesia, the last place in the country where I would have spent at least one second is in Bali. The mere idea of going there gave me chills. It is for this reason then, that destiny put the nearest bike shop where to buy and replace the broken component of my bike, where? Precisely, in Bali. So from Labuanbajo, we took the Bukit Tilongkabila, heading to Denpasar, the island's capital. Those were the last 32 hours that we would have to spend on a PELNI on this journey and like all previous times, it was a PELNI experience like the one described in the previous posts. Getting off at the port of Denpasar, was like getting off in another country. If ever in history, Bali was a paradise, now certainly it is almost impossible to imagine. Our stay was limited to going from the port to the bike shop, and from the bike shop, we cycled 140 km west to cross to Java. We minimized this nuisance to just 10 hours only. Shortly after midnight, we were already disembarking in Banyuwangi, Java. It was time to go up to see the Earth breathing.