My heart is beating so fast. I can’t breath properly. I’m crying rivers from the smoke in my eyes.

A mum is asking her nine years old kid to remove her gaz mask to take a picture with her bloody iPhone. The rotten eggs smell is unbearable. He throws up. 

How did he arrive here at night anyway? It took me all my energy to reach the crater… 

  
We decide to come back to the van. We won’t be able to see the sunrise today. A pale light starts to glow in the sky announcing a cloudy day. Or maybe it’s the smoke from the volcano blurring the landscape… I am disconnected from all of life’s normal sensations. It is too much.

When the night slowly disappears, you have the feeling of waking up from a bad dream. Only to find yourself in another one. I had the voice of Ali in my ears during the hike, guiding me through space. In a way I tried to imagine how the rocks would look, what the forms in the dark were really, but my imagination didn’t come close to reality.

  
    
  

You can easily think that you arrived on a cold and isolated weird planet via spaceship. The colours of the rocks and their shape is so unreal that I feel like being on the Moon or on Mars. Everybody walks slowly and in silence. You can’t see any faces, they are all covered with gaz masks. Yep. You are on another planet.

  
  
      
  

Since the beginning of the excursion, and anytime I mention my nationality to one of Ali’s friends, the same reaction and words appear in their mouth: ” Nicholas Hulot “. They were bestowing on me a particular affection because I was French, like him.

It’s kind of an unusual story that follows here. 

This Nicolas Hulot dude, who is a famous figure of the ecology, journalistic and political area in France apparently did a lot for these guys. 

I remember watching his tv shows when I was a kid and later listening to his political point of views. Nicholas Hulot is the adventurous cousin that everybody wants to have. He is cool. And he is nice. He always tried to take the mainstream audience into remote places, with native tribes…  He loves the colorful diversity of Humanity and knows how to share it. 

He was kind of a model for me when I was a little girl and of course, I wanted to do like him: crossing continents, talking to people from other countries, exploring the depth of the ocean and staying forever curious and in love with life and earth.

  
    

So. Nicolas Hulot came few years ago for a little reportage about the hard working conditions at Ijen cratere. He listened to them, gave them the opportunity to talk about their life and made them feel important.

When the shooting ended, instead of saying “thanks guys, see you soon”, he offered them winter coats, hiking boots and a little money.  

Can we take a moment to think about this? How many personalities are using their notorious image to do good in this way? How many people on earth actually feel implicated in these causes and try to change people’s lives?
 
    
 

I am not Nicolas Hulot, I had nothing to offer to these guys excepted my ears to listen to their stories and my compassion. In a way, I gave a bit of my money too by hiking there and I felt that it was a good thing to share for a bit their time, to really understand how lucky most of people on earth are. The fate of life put my parents in France, and made me French, and it put their parent here, at the rim of the crater.

We asked Ali why he was still doing this, every day. He replied that with no diploma, he couldn’t work in a market or do anything else. The crater was his destiny, but he was trying to change things for his kids. Luckily, he started to learn English by giving tours of the crater a few months ago, and although he is working double shifts today, maybe soon he will become a professional tour guide – and not a sulfur laborer as well. 

    
    
    
  
  
  

On the way back, we stopped in the little shelter he was sleeping and eating in everyday. It was so extremely rough that I was torn between sitting on the ground and crying for him and the other guys, or laughing out loud at this tragically dramatic mise en scene (staging) – so incredibly barren it defied belief.

I turned to my friend, and fellow traveler, Alberto and asked if he thought this was real, or if it was a setup to ask us for some tips. He assured me that he’d watched a documentary about this place and what Ali told us looked legit. Apparently, it was one of the worst place on earth to work and live.
  

Before returning to the Van, we stopped few minutes to listen to the croaky screams of some Monkeys living in the trees on the side of the volcano. Ali loved them. We could all observe how human-like their faces were. Scary…