The descent into the crater took us a good ½ hour, 20 minutes on site and another ½ to go back up, so it was almost 1 hour and a half for the porters to go through the crater, but with 80kg on our backs when I only had 5/6 kg I can't imagine...
Well yes, I could see it, if some seemed to do it with disconcerting ease (enough to make Mr. Universe pale), others were clearly struggling, moving forward with heavy steps (inevitably...) small steps, stopping regularly (but all of them still take regular breaks, in the case of our guide he will stop at least 5 or 6 times in total, let's be realistic it's simply impossible to do the course in one go) with big drops of sweat and a look that says it all, it makes me sad, meanwhile our "spiritual guide" who doesn't speak, he, traces.
Without any real surprise he asked us for money, the problem being that we had none left, if you have read the previous blog posts, we had basically spent our cash at the moment at Mt Bromo, we gave him the little we had left (that is to say something like 6.000 IDR… the equivalent of 10kg of sulfur…) and we were really embarrassed and saddened to have so little to offer him (obviously no ATM in the area…). At the time he was a bit pissed, bad luck…
This concludes Kawah Ijen and also our stay in Java, now we head to Bali for a completely different universe.
