The Journey to Ijen, chapter Three (epilogue?)

Descending Kawah Ijen in the light of day proves to be yet another unique and beautiful experience. Though my legs feel heavy, and occasionally my poor footwear slips on loose dirt (I never fall, though once I happened to slip in a sort of slapstick manner right next to some climbing Indonesians, who reached out to catch me).

The clouds are below us, which is a neat sight, with a lonesome peak floating out in the clouds ahead of us.

Halfway down, there is a shack, or set of shacks, where people are buying tea and coffee and these...basicall cup-o-noodle things (Pop-Mie I think). Here something amazing happens.

We finally meet Sam!

Here's Sam's website, Ijen Expedition which has good pictures you can look at.

Anyway, we all get some hot tea and sit down to talk. I feel some kind of closure. Alex and Christian compliment Sam's photography. Jemma asks Sam lots of questions, and we learn about stuff, including conservation efforts on the mountain. After a while we depart and continue the hike down.

We reach the parking lot, pile into the jeep and drive back to the Resto. Here, another quirky coincidence occurs, as we seem to have arrived just in time to see some kind of bike race going up the mountain. As we go down, multiple times we need to pull over to make way for police escorted bikers pumping their way up the road.

Back at the resto, we have breakfast which is Nasi Goreng (fried rice, with an egg). Can't go wrong with Nasi Goreng! We pack up and Christian and I begin to plan our fateful departure...

I like to call this next part of the story:

Getting the fuck OUT of Banyuwangi

Things go downhill quickly...I mean that idiomatically, though I guess it is also literally true. We decide to take the train to Yogyakarta, though we already have reserved seats on a flight from Denpasar--it just seems like too much effort to get all the way back to Denpasar. Our guide says he can take us to a hotel in Banyuwangi near the train station, and we think from there we will get our train trip organized for the next morning.

Well, we get to the hotel. It costs the equivalent of seven dollars. No AC, no shower, a squat toilet. We figure it'll be fine since all we need is beds. We figured wrong.

As we lay there planning our trip, it took a long time to wrap our heads around the train system. Eventually, I figured out that we'd need to be at the station around 8:45ish, the train would have AC, but the trip to Yogya would be twelve hours. 

Then the unthinkable happened. Christian had to use the toilet. I wished him luck, and went back to my nap. Some time later he came out of the bathroom.

I can't go into detail here, because I never asked for details; but the look on his face as he emerged from the bathroom spoke volumes. It was one of those "seen a ghost" faces. 

As I sat there contemplating the sad state of affairs we'd brought upon ourselves, I realized something important: holy crap, I do not want to be on a train for 12 hours. We needed to GTFO. I asked the front desk to call us a taxi, and laid out my plan: We get a taxi to the ferry harbor, take all our stuff with us and leave the key here with the door unlocked. At the harbor, we get a bus to Denpasar. If that fails, we'll have to come back. In Denpasar, we'll get to a hostel and then in the morning go on our flight. We'd already made arrangements for a hostel right next to the airport.

So off we went. The hotel lady at the desk spoke 0 english, and I wasn't about to try to explain this ordeal to her. I can only imagine what she was thinking as we jumped into the taxi with our bags.

We get to the ferry for a reasonable price, as this is a legit taxi that actually uses the meter. Getting out, we immediately are confronted by a guy, and I don't really remember what happened but we basically said we were looking for a bus to Denpasar and he was like "you take my bus!" and walked us into the harbor (we had to pay for a ferry ticket) and then we waited for the bus.

the bus...

Though our spirits were high from our escape from Banyuwangi, this bus was about to slowly crush them over the course of a ridiculous seven hour drive. Yes, though our bus-ride to Banyuwangi had been under 4, this bus ride would not have such an easy fate. In addition, this bus was way cheaper, and as a result has no AC, uncomfortable seats, and was full of indonesian men smoking cigarettes. 

These things wouldn't really have been that bad, but for the fact that the trip was so interminable; traffic didn't really go our way, it began to rain, night fell, everything conspired to make this bus go as slow as possible, with no real possibility for us to sleep through it.

...

The bus pulls over somewhere north of Denpasar. People are getting off, apparently transferring into vans. Some guy asks us where we are going. Kuta, we say, as that is the general area of our hostel. We are the only ones going that way. But its ok, he'll take us for roughly the same price as we'd paid for the hotel we left behind in Banyuwangi. I honestly had no idea how far we were from our destination, but I wasn't going to haggle--I needed to get off that bus.

"This car costs as much as that hotel room" I say.

Christian agrees.

"I'd sleep in this car better than at that hotel," I muse.

"At least here we have toilet paper," Christian says, gesturing at the newspaper in the seat-back pocket.

And so, eventually the car brought us to our hostel, where we paid for a night and at long last slept in relative comfort. Even showered. But sadly, we had to be up at 6 AM to catch our ride to the airport and fly, so even then we didn't get a full night of sleep. In the morning we got to the airport, got our boarding passes, and everything went normally from there--except that the airplane's AC vents were pouring out clouds of water vapor, which was....different. But that was only while we were on the ground.

Anyway, that basically brings us to Yogyakarta on the morning of the 8th. We got to our hostel waaaay early before check-in, so we sat around and spent a long time in a pizza hut which was open (things seem to open pretty late around these parts. In Singapore we went through a mall frequently, and most shops weren't open until something like 11 am). Nice place, that pizza hut. Nicer than one in America, I'd say. And I did a survey to get free breadsticks, so I'll have to go back for that.