More Adventures in the Ijen: Escape from the Toxic Lake

Before we can escape the lake of farts for the coffee plantation, there is, as ever, the little matter of our motorbike.

After our ordeal getting up here, it is a) low on gas and, b) as I discover, with the assistance of a small-to-medium crowd of helpful chaps, almost completely out of oil.

A little store opposite the mountain refuge sells staples such as packet noodles, cigarettes, peanuts and petrol.

It looks like good petrol, actually.

It’s in a glass bottle, not a mineral water bottle.

It’s unclouded, roughly petrol-coloured, with no suspicious globules or sediment.

“Do you sell oil?” I ask the lady.

“Oil?” she says, looking at me as if I’m mad. “No.”

Whoops, I think.

At least so far as my sleep-deprived brain can cope with anything, this seems like a problem.

Back at the park, we catch up with our ranger friend.

“Where can I buy oil here?”

“Over there.”

“I just asked over there,” I say. “They don’t have it.”

“They have it in Sempol,” he says. “It’s 15k. You can drive the bike that far.”

“No,” says my helper. “She’s completely out.”

“You can freewheel,” says the ranger. “It’s downhill.”

Folk nod. Everyone freewheels down hills in Indonesia anyway – it’s not unusual for even quite substantial trucks to creep up on one silently on a steep descent.

“I don’t want to freewheel,” I say. “Is there an ojek who can go to Sempol and buy me some oil?”

“It’s expensive,” he says.

“Not as expensive as running out of oil and breaking the engine,” I say, with bitter memories of our extended sojourn at the convent in Ruteng.

Heads nod in agreement.

An ojek shows up, takes a hundred thousand rupiah and speeds off towards Sempol.

Seconds later, the lady’s husband emerges from somewhere out the back, wiping his hands on a dirty rag.

“Oil?” he says. “Someone said you wanted oil. Engine oil? I’ve got engine oil.”

B*gger, I think.

“An ojek’s gone already. Anyone have his number?”

Nope.

So we sit in the sun sipping coffee (me) and Coke (Z) and chatting with the chaps. “You’re not going to Banyuwangi, are you?” one asks.

“No,” I said. “I came up that road. I don’t want to go down it on this bike.”

“I don’t think you can go down it on that bike,” he says. “You’ll break the suspension.”

“Ya,” I say. “But the road to Bondowoso’s not so bad, is it?”

“It’s broken,” he says. “Pretty much the same as the one you came up. But it’s not so steep, so it’s easier. It’s pretty level.”

Z adopts a look of arrant scepticism that would shame Stewie from Family Guy.

The oil that returns from Sempol sparks some discussion among our curious crowd of helpers.

“You can’t use this on an automatic,” one says.

“Yes you can,” says another.

The guys take it in turns to scrutinise the back of the bottle with an intensity not obviously justified by the limited text it contains.

Much discussion.

“It’s fine,” says the ranger, definitively.

It doesn’t look fine. It’s pink and gloopy. It looks more like fabric conditioner than anything that belongs in a vehicle.

Sadly, although I own the vehicle under discussion, I really don’t have a lot to contribute.

“Should it really be pink?” I ask feebly.

“Ya,” says the ranger. “Engine oil comes in all sorts of colours. Blue, black, pink…”

“OK,” I say.

He grabs a funnel from the mechanic, and pretty much empties the bottle into the bike.

“I don’t like the look of this oil,” says Z, in English. “I’m not happy about it at all. I think it could break the bike.”

“I know,” I say. “I’m not happy about it either. But we don’t have a lot of options. I’ll just drive slowly, right? That way, even if it’s bad oil the engine won’t overheat.”

We set off, v-e-r-y slowly, through the plains of Ijen. It’s a beautiful ride.

The narrow, tarmac road curves through coffee plantations, the dark bushes sprouting delicate white flowers alongside their scarlet berries.

Tall savannah grasses give way to avenues of rubber trees. Feathery conifers stand like soldiers against a backdrop of dark volcanic peaks.

We stop to rest the bike by a stream turned vivid green by sulphates that foams over rocks of red and purple sandstone.

Java is the world’s most populous island. But it doesn’t feel that way out here in the Ijen. Only the odd palm-thatched hut creates a rural feel like Constable’s peasant cottages.

We trundle into Sempol, a dusty little place with a police station, a few shops, a school, a couple of mosques and lots of little houses with folk selling their daily crop of fruit, veg and chillis out the front.

“Can you tell us the way to the coffee plantation, Arabica?” I ask.

“Sure, sure, down that way.”

“Oh god,” says Z from the back of the bike. “This really is a terrible road. I don’t know what they mean by ‘a little bit broken’. I really don’t.”

We’ve both, I think, forgotten as we amble through the Ijen that, well, I’ve had no sleep at all and climbed a volcano, while Z’s had a broken night, climbed a volcano *AND* been gassed by it, to boot. (Here’s the back story, in case you missed it.)

Ergo, neither of us is in the best frame of mind for dirtbiking on a debatably broken bike that flatly resists any attempts at acceleration.

“Never mind,” I say brightly. “It’s only 4k more.”

We ask for directions another time. “Straight on, straight on… In Blawan.”

And down we bump and judder, incredibly slowly, over the rocks.

Blawan sits in a valley, around a fast-flowing stream that tumbles down the rocks in a waterfall that’s impressive even now, without rain. It must have been a lethal torrent before they harnessed it for hydro-electricity.

We head up to the coffee plantation, a pink, colonial affair, surrounded by swathes of beige beans drying in the sun like so many grains of rice.

“This isn’t Arabica,” I say. “It’s Catimor. We’re at the wrong bl**dy coffee plantation.”

I am cross, sweaty, filthy and sleepless.

I want nothing more than to stamp my feet, jump up and down and have a complete, infantile tantrum.

“Oh god,” says Z. “Why is it that NO ONE here knows the way to ANYWHERE?”

“Let’s see if they’ve got rooms,” I say. “I really need to get some sleep. Plus I don’t know if the bike’s going to go back up that road. Damn. I was really looking forward to a pool.”

We wander in.

“Uh, Mum,” says Z, and points.

A little turquoise swimming pool, fed by cold springs, sits beside an even smaller hot tub stained golden by volcanic hot springs, with hibiscus and bougainvillea drooping into it.

They also have a room.

“Well,” says Z, pragmatically. “I think this is EXCELLENT value for under fifteen dollars. Now, if you’ll excuse me, I’m going for a swim.”

It’s a sweet little place, Blawan. Neat streets of the boxy pink kampung houses we’ve seen looking so out of place in the wilds of Halmahera, now in their natural habitat of rural Java.

It has the feel, almost, of one of those model villages the more conscience-stricken Victorian factory-owners created for their workers.

We visit the hot waterfall, its waters so scalding that even in the tropical heat steam fills the air. We explore the coffee factory.

They farm luwak here, the palm civets that feed on coffee cherries and poop out pre-digested beans to create the delicacy known as kopi luwak.

Z is fascinated by the different machines, sluices, channels, driers, graders and sorters that turn red berries into sun-dried, heat-dried beans, graded and ready for roasting, within only a few days.

No one’s about at the hydroelectric plant, so we let ourselves in and gawp at the little belts that somehow harness enough energy to power not only the plantation but the entire village.

And we learn that jumping out of a hot-spring hot tub and into a cold-spring pool and back again is every bit as much fun as racing naked out of a sauna and into the snow to make snow angels.

The security guard at the plantation inspects my bike for me then takes it for a spin to test the engine.

“Ya,” he says, when he returns. “No problem with the engine. You just need to give the oil time to work its way through.”

“Thanks,” I say. “About the road, to Bondowoso…”

“Ya,” he says. “It’s a little bit broken. Not so bad.”

And so we set out for Bondowoso in search of civilization…