The truth is I am not really sure how to describe a day like today. So many images and emotions were and are swirling around in my head that it is all a bit difficult to decipher. I’ll give it a shot.
I get up at 4 am in order to get an early start. As it turns out this was a smart move. My destination: Ijen Plateau –
“The Ijen volcano complex is a group of stratovolcanoes, in East Java, Indonesia. It is inside a larger caldera Ijen, which is about 20 kilometers wide. The Gunung Merapi stratovolcano (not to be confused with Central Java's Gunung Merapi) is the highest point of that complex.West of Gunung Merapi is the Ijen volcano, which has a one-kilometer-wide turquoise-colored acid crater lake. The lake is the site of a labor-intensive sulfur mining operation, in which sulfur-laden baskets are carried by hand from the crater floor. Many other post-caldera cones and craters are located within the caldera or along its rim. The largest concentration of post-caldera cones forms an E-W-trending zone across the southern side of the caldera. The active crater at Kawah Ijen has an equivalent radius of 361 meters, a surface of 41 × 106 square meters. It is 200 meters deep and has a volume of 36 × 106 cubic meters.” Wikipedia.
The trip from Bondowoso took about two hours give or take. It was the pathetic state of a stretch of the road to the plateau that accounts for much of the travel time. Some parts of that road are nothing but gravel and miniature boulders, not exactly the terrain for which my motorcycle was designed. When I arrived back at the hotel the ‘Phantom’ decal plate fell off the gas tank. Shake, rattle, and roll.
