The Mountain That Changed Its Career
Step off the ferry from Bali into Banyuwangi, a town that feels like a world away from the Hindu tourist mecca of Bali. Twelve years it was even more of a stark adjustment, coffee was worse, the warungs cheaper, and the signs pointing to Kawah Ijen were few and modest. Now the town hums with booking offices, motorbike rentals, and cafés selling frappés to backpackers waiting for their 1 a.m. pickup.
Banyuwangi has caught the contagion of tourism, and Kawah Ijen - the smoking engine room that looms above it - has changed its career.
The mountain once supported a simple brutal economy: sulphur. The crater of Kawah Ijen contains one of the world’s largest accessible sulphur deposits. Volcanic gases rich in sulphur dioxide are vented through ceramic pipes, condensing into liquid sulphur, dripping onto the crater floor and hardening into red, then bright yellow slabs.
The miners brave toxic plumes to break it up with iron bars, load the pieces into two baskets slung from a yoke, and balance the load across their shoulders. For decades, hundreds of men shouldered wicker baskets down its steep paths twice each day, hauling blocks of neon yellow sulphur from the depths of the crater to the base kilometres away.
But this is backbreaking work (literally), a typical haul (70-100 kgs) needs to be carried up 300m from the crater floor to the rim; then it’s another 3kms down to the weighing station. Miners would make two trips a day. For this, they earned the equivalent of US$13.
While the mountain’s original product was chemical, extracted at enormous cost to human backs and lungs. Today, the mountain is a stage for a unique tourist experience.
Banyuwangi runs on midnight alarms: jeeps and vans line up in convoys to drive the switchback roads. Visitors climb in convoys to see the “blue fire,” to take selfies with miners in gas masks, to be carried in human-powered trolleys up slopes that miners once descended under loads heavier than their own bodies. A thousand foreigners illuminate the journey down into the crater for the blue fire, then crowds the crater rim for sunrise. What was once a workplace is now a tourist trap.
A new kind of miner has emerged - those who push or drag purpose-built trolleys, offering to haul visitors up the track. A miner carrying sulphur might take home 150,000 rupiah for a day’s punishing work. A porter pushing a tourist up the mountain might make the same amount in an hour. The commodity has shifted: it is no longer sulphur, but the bodies and desires of travellers.
Changes
When I first climbed Kawah Ijen more than a decade ago, there were only a few overpriced organised tours. The path was dark, devoid, and rough. I remember few other tourists, many miners, and gas masks were rare.
Returning now, the path is a highway. Lines of visitors shuffle along, guides shouting to keep them together. The blue fire at the crater floor, once a mysterious flicker in the dark, now is almost outshone by a sky of raised phones. What felt like a harsh workplace has become a theatre, and I, camera in hand, am part of the audience.
Both careers that this mountain has experienced relies on labour, both wear down bodies, and both are subject to global markets - one in chemicals, the other in tourism.
The shift is positive. Tourism provides higher incomes and, arguably, reduces the health risks for those who leave mining for guiding or portering. Its also meant that proper gas masks are cheap, a decade ago men would simply wrap clothing around their face for protection from the noxious fumes.
What once left the crater in baskets now leaves in Instagram posts. The sulphur is still there, but it has been relegated to a backdrop.
