Good things

Twice in the last two weeks I have found myself in truly alien landscapes, looking around only vaguely understanding where I am, putting it all together very slowly, allowing myself to be taken by it and relegating the understanding to a later day.
The first was at Gunung Bromo, an active volcano in Eastern Java, which constantly spews a steady stream of sulphur and rests in the shadow of another much bigger volcano that shoots ash into the sky every ten minutes. The very lazy take a far too small horse from the base of Bromo to the foot of a staircase that carries you the rest of the way to the summit, but I, along with Anna and Joanne my two new Dutch travel partners, decided to hoof it for the twenty minutes it takes, half amused and half horrified by the fat tourists weighing down their horses. At the summit you stare into the heart of it, a very unusual chalky color flecked with deep maroons in places, then turn to view the surrounding hills and flat lowlands, giants buried in the earth with their spines exposed, colors as rich as you think possible.
The second was the very next day a few hundred kilometers further into East Java at the Ijen Plateau, a place I new almost nothing about before I came other than that it was to be something beautiful, and to some, quite amazing. What I was never told before is that you are going there to witness humanity in a form completely incomprehensible to most, to see a mountain and it's crater merely as a backdrop . As you walk the hour hike to the top of the mountain you begin to see many workers coming up the hill behind you carrying two baskets suspended between a plank of bamboo. At the moment you have no idea what it's used for. The farther you go up, the more workers you see, and eventually you notice that some of them have incredibly large pieces of sulphur rock filling both baskets. When you finally reach the summit you look down into the crater and see the small sources of sulphur leaking out, the brightest blue lake, the fluorescent yellow and dark red walls, the sand trails snaking through the water; then you see to the very bottom, a very, very long and steep way down and you finally realize what these men are doing, where the rocks are coming from, and how completely impossible it seems that men as old as 60 are carrying out loads of sulphur weighing upwards of 150 lbs from the bottom of a volcano up a steep and extremely perilous path only ever wide enough to barely squeeze two people by at the same time, then all the way down the mountain to unload, a journey they can complete twice a day working ten hours each day, being paid the equivalent of US$6 a day. Every one of these men works for 20 years or until they die, which many do from falling, exhaustion and heart and lung problems due to the fact that they are constantly covered and breathing in sulphur, sometimes so thick that you can't see a few inches in front of you, dependent upon the wind to shift to clear the path again. I walked all the way down the path to the source of the sulphur, talked to many of the workers, saw exactly how they were working, got horribly in the way, surely made their jobs more difficult by my presence but not one of them didn't smile and say hello, offer to give me a sulphur rock or ask me for a cigarette that I wished I would have bought a pack of just to give away. None of us, myself, Joanne, Anna, or Kendra and Irene my new American travel partners could make any good sense of it at the time, and even days later we are still enjoying being completely baffled by it.
I decided to follow Kendra and Irene into Bali, and they invited me to come to Pemuteran with them, a small beach village with few tourists, kind locals and good food. Nate eventually met up with us there, and we all snorkeled every day and spent a lot of time relaxing. After four days we had made many new friends and I had traded my t-shirt with Bang Bang, the cook at our favorite road side food stall.
Nate and I are now in Ubud, after a disastrous trip to Kuta to try and find a bar that played the Super Bowl but failing. It's perfect here, everyone loves art and music and the Balinese culture is evident in most everything you see. Today we played with monkeys and Nate almost got his face eaten off, tonight we'll see a gamelan and dance performance, tomorrow maybe some white water rafting then meeting back up with the girls, the next day touring the countryside, Friday to Denpasar to catch a flight to Kuala Lumpur, Sunday the Indian festival of Thaipusam, after that we have no idea.
For those of you worried, last night Nate and I finally found a bar to watch a replay of the Super Bowl, and it was only fitting that the two Arizona boys were joined by another traveler living in Seattle who was from Pittsburgh. The locals working the bar had no idea what we were watching or why it made us so happy.
Love to all,
B