After our trials and tribulations getting to Ijen, the mountain refuge feels, well, gooooood…

Basic, sure.

But basic in a good, sweet, simple way.

We’re aiming for a 4am start to climb up to Kawah Ijen, the sulphur crater lake we childishly call the “lake of farts”, with its dazzling views over the volcanoes of both Java and Bali.

Miraculously, after a chapter of Through the Looking Glass, Z is asleep by 8pm.

And I do mean miraculously.

The last time he was asleep before 8pm was the first day of our Mount Kinabalu climb, and then he’d ascended well over 1000m.

Before that?

I honestly cannot remember.

Z has never been keen on going to sleep.

After he was born, I put him on my chest for that magic mother-son bonding moment.

He stared beadily at me with reptilian eyes (“good focus!” said the midwife), wailed in utter horror, took a reluctant go at the boob, peed all over his grandfather, and then alternated seamlessly between beady, disapproving, blurry stares and, well, wailing.

“No problem, darlin’,” says the midwife. “He’ll be asleep in no time.”

I had to stay in hospital for six hours before they’d let me take him home.

“He’ll be off in a minute,” said the midwife, roughly once an hour.

He finally fell asleep in the car.

So his sleep is seriously a miracle.

I’m also a night owl.

But, so what? I can do the climb on four hours sleep.

I read a few more chapters of Bleak House, until my computer dies, and switch off the lights round midnight.

I’m just in that meditative haze that precedes the onset of REM sleep when…

… the neighbours come in…

From the sound of it they’re students at a college in Java. There’s a gang of them. They’re super-stoked to be here.

They’re not *exactly* noisy. They’re talking, laughing, playing music quietly on someone’s mobile phone.

Due, I suspect, to the absence of alcohol, they’re a hell of a lot quieter than a Western group.

It’s kinda sweet to hear modern youth having such wholesome fun.

Yet not conducive to sleep.

I lie in the dark and seethe, quietly.

Around half midnight, Z wakes up.

“God,” he says, in the tone of someone several decades older. “I wish those bl**dy kids would just shut the f*ck up.”

Now, I’m chary of complaining about noise. Not least because I’m a serial offender in this area myself.

All the same, I begin with some passive aggressive stomping, in the manner of someone who has just been forcibly awoken.

A few loud sighs.

A token thump on the wall.

It’s terribly British. And utterly ineffective.

Which is odd. Because I normally have passive-aggression down pat.

Time passes.

“I think I should say something, don’t you?” I say, Britishly.

“Yeah,” says Z. “It’s a mountain hut, after all…”

And there, I think, lies the nub. Or the rub.

Folk stay in mountain huts because they are, generally, planning on awaking at some ungodly hour to climb something for sunrise.

Therefore, the default assumption after about, ooh, 9pm, is that one’s neighbours are trying to sleep.

And, therefore, one should STFU already.

I brace myself.

Wrap a sarong over my nightie.

And head out into the passageway.

“Excuse me,” I say in Indonesian, in my finest ‘I could be your mother or your teacher’ voice.

“My child is trying to sleep because we are climbing the mountain at 4am tomorrow. Can you be a little, ah…”

I’ve forgotten the word for “quiet”. But it works. There’s silence.

Or almost-silence.

Z goes back to sleep around 1.30, two and a half hours before we are scheduled to ascend the mountain.

I lie there, seething at myself for not having shut the neighbours up sooner.

At 2am, the first groups start getting up.

By about 2.30, they’ve all left. I can STILL get an hour and a half’s sleep, I think.

Then the 3am hikers set out.

Including, I am pleased to hear, all of the folk next door.

Well, almost all.

Clearly two of them have stayed behind.

For through the wall drift the quite unmistakable and terribly appreciative sounds of folk in their late teens who usually live with their parents uh… well, uh… getting it on.

There’s not a lot to be done about this, to be frank.

I kind of sympathise. Not only because (as regular readers might recall) I’m growing cobwebs in that area myself.

But those few Indonesians who make it through to higher education generally live with their parents while they study.

And Indonesian society is not liberal when it comes to affairs of the heart. Or lower, for that matter. In the remoter parts of Indonesia, I learned, single mothers can be imprisoned.

So this may be their first time. Or at least their first time in a bed.

And I’m really not going to humiliate them just because I can’t sleep.

It (he?) finishes quickly, I’m pleased to note.

Then — oh the energy of youth! — they embark on round 2.

I lumber, saggy-eyed, across the room, breaking Z’s new sunglasses in the process, to reset our alarm from half an hour’s time to four and a half hours’ time.

By 4am, cars and people carriers full of group tours are pulling up, and the rest of the huts are well awake, plus the sky is glimmering from black to midnight blue.

I do the insomniac maths.

“If I go to sleep in half an hour, I can get three and half hours’ sleep. That will be easily — well, sort of — enough to climb a mountain, get back down, then drive 4 or 5 hours on a motorbike.”

It’s no good.

Sleep is not gonna happen.

F*ck it, I think. Let’s DO this thing.

I spring out of bed with a forced alertness, brush my teeth in our sinkless bathroom, sluice the paste down the floor-drain, sling on yesterday’s clothes and say brightly, “Wakey-wakey, Z! It’s time to climb the mountain!”

Kawah Ijen is less a climb than a very steep walk.

A broad path lined with conifers and tropical hedgerow offers the occasional dazzling view across to the sacred volcano, Mount Merapi, haloed in the dawn mist and framed by slender branches.

Z remarks unfavourably on his fitness a few hundred metres in (or, rather, up).

I feel flabby, leaden, sleepless.

Teams of hikers on group tours steam past us. Most in boots (I’m wearing flip-flops). And many in full makeup.

Seriously?! When did this start happening?!

You get up at 3am to climb a mountain. And you apply *full* makeup?

It’s like wearing full makeup to the beach. Or diving.

It makes no sense AT ALL to me.

Although, I suppose, had I applied makeup I would look rather better than I do. Mmm…

As the hikers steam up, the sulphur miners are racing down.

These guys work in teams in the bowels of hell, extracting freshly formed solid sulphur, as smooth and hard as marble, from the lake shore.

Carriers gallop down, bamboo baskets yoked across their shoulders, apparently immune to the stench of, well, bottom gases which permeates the mountainside.

As we plod, leaden, up the hill, pausing every so often for a square of chocolate or a can of Coke, they run past us, bearing tens of kilos of solid sulphur without even breaking sweat.

Surely, I think to myself, it would be illegal even to walk up here, let alone work, in the EU?

Some have diversified into crafting what have to be the most unappealing souvenirs I’ve ever seen. Or, rather, smelt.

Small, polished turtles (turdles?) and fish, with the sheen of pale yellow plastic, the weight of stone, and, well, the inexorable odour of bowel gases…

We transform my hoodie into a face mask for Z.

As we near the top, the cloud cover thickens and the atmosphere thickens from the occasional flatulent waft to an acrid, smoky exhalation that stings the throat as you breathe.

“This is really painful, Mum,” says Z, through my hoodie. “I don’t know how the miners do it.”

“Not far to go now,” I say, brightly (brightness is my default mode with anything involving Z and early rising). “You’re doing really well!”

We’re almost at the crater now, and the path has turned to steps. A couple of guys have paused on the way down to cough.

“The view’s AMAZING!” one says, when he’s finished coughing.

“Is the sulphur still there?” I ask. “Is it as bad as this?”

“It’s pretty bad,” he says. “Worse. But the view…”

“I’m not sure I can carry on,” says Z. His eyes are streaming.

“How far is it?” I ask.

“2 kilos, maybe?” he says, then looks at Z. “I’m not sure your son’s going to make it, though.”

“When I do tours,” says his mate, helpfully, “I always give my groups surgical masks in case the clouds come in. You soak them in water.”

Now, I’d chivvy my son through a toxic mist for a few hundred metres more.

But two thousand? No way.

Lake of farts = 1. Z = 0.

“I’m sorry, Mum,” says Z, as we emerge from the mists, en route down from the amazing views we have not seen and the sulphur lake we have yet to witness.

“It’s OK, sweetheart,” I say. “It’s not your fault you don’t react well with sulphur.”

“Yes,” he begins, with an enthusiasm usually reserved for topics such as Family Guy and Minecraft.

“Do you think I’ve PERMANENTLY DAMAGED my lungs? Do you reckon I’m suffering from GAS INHALATION like they did in World War One? Sulphur is HIGHLY TOXIC, isn’t it? I think this is ACTUALLY quite DANGEROUS. I mean, I could be PERMANENTLY DAMAGED. My lungs might NEVER RECOVER. I have BASICALLY been inhaling SULPHURIC ACID…”

I cut into his flow. “I think you’re talking quite a lot for someone with lung damage… Plus, lungs recover quite well. They’re designed to process pollutants and toxins in the atmosphere.”

“But sulphur is toxic, isn’t it?” he says. “I’m breathing sulphuric acid, right?”

“No,” I say, flannelling frantically. “Sulphur doesn’t just form acid. You need to mix it with something, I think. It needs to react with something. Like water, I think?”

“Oh!” he says. “So that’s what’s happening here. The sulphur’s rising from the lake and mixing with the water vapour in the clouds to form acid. That must have been what the people at the warung meant about leaving at 2am to avoid climbing through the clouds!”

“Ummm…” I say.

I am struggling to remember the formula. Na? Nope. That’s sodium, not sulphur. Dioxide? That would be O2? How many hooks does a sulphur atom have?

“So that’s how acid rain is formed?” he asks.

“Umm…” I say.

We chat science all the way down. A process which would be phenomenally educational were it not for the fact that I stopped studying any form of science aged 15, Z is a total science geek, and I have already imparted to him everything I can recall from my long-ago GCSE chemistry course.

Back at base, we head for the warung for more caffeine and sugar.

“How was it?” they ask, fussing over Z.

“Oh,” I say. “We had a little bit of a problem. We didn’t see the lake. Z was trying to climb and then… not rain…” I bring out my hand gestures to try to communicate. “Not rain, but in the air, makes him sick, problem here…”

“Oh!” they say. “The *sulphur*?”

Christ, I think.

So *that’s* the missing word.

“See?” says Z. “That IS what they were explaining last night.”

“Ya,” they say. “You need a surgical mask when there’s clouds because of the sulphur.”

“You sell surgical masks?!” I ask.

“Ya!” they say.

“Crikey,” I say to Z. “Those miners should stop selling the turdles and move into surgical masks. They’d make a bl**dy killing.”

It is coming up for 8am, Java time, the sun is up and it’s a beautiful day. We’ve just been up and down an (admittedly small) mountain, through clouds of (admittedly very dilute) sulphuric acid.

I have had precisely zero sleep. Z has had a broken night.

And so, for the n-th time to date we are