Two hobbits and a wizard take an unexpected journey

blue fire, misty mountain tops, and why Indonesia is basically Middle Earth

I've finally got around to it. Put down your knitting, stoke the fire, and put up your feet. The three muskebeers' quest from Bali to Singapore is being typed up.

The title for this piece derives from the fact that I recently re-watched The Hobbit on my night train from Bangkok to Chiang Mai. My sleeper carriage upper berth (seat 38) was quite cosy if you overlooked the overpowering stench of urine wafting from the singular toilet—not exactly hobbit-hole-cosy but maybe comfy enough to satisfy a small troll (and thus good enough for me). As I watched umpteen dwarves be the worst house guests in (pseudo)history, it occurred to me that there were some similarities between Bilbo's reluctant journey to visit Smaug, and the journey undertaken approximately a month ago by myself, Toby, and Lottie. I mean, not many similarities beyond Toby's wizardish height; our need for mead pitstops (bintang beer); and a series of misadventures involving strange creatures, places, and people—along with the fact that, like The Hobbit, this series of articles will likely be too long to absorb in one sitting. But look, every Substack needs a title so kindly leave me alone.

I will also take the opportunity to preface this piece with two unrelated grumbles.

1) My bluetooth keyboard has died in one corner which—regrettably—includes the spacebar. As a consequence, my typing is considerably slowed and quite tedious.

2) All of my prior progress on this Substack was somehow deleted in the last twenty-four hours, so I'll be starting from scratch. Yipeedoo.

Grumbles grumbled, our story begins (not too) long ago in a (legitimately) faraway land.

Tucked down a winding lane leading to the sea, in the sleepy district of Medewi on the west coast of Bali, there stands a bustling storefront. The sun is beating down with a intensity that makes the air feel thick and soup-like, but the unbothered shop window overflows with baked goods and delicate fancies. Eleven women on mopeds come to a skidding halt outside, dressed head-to-toe in white and red, and begin squabbling over the last tiramisu doughnut. What better way to celebrate the 80th anniversary of Indonesia’s independence than a wild brunch with the girls? Too busy salivating over focaccia sandwiches and fruit smoothies to pay much attention to this racket, however, our three fresh-faced (for now) backpackers huddle on a picnic bench plotting their next move: a local bus to Gilimanuk, followed by a ferry crossing to Java.

Sidenote: Too much time has passed since the event for me to be sure of exactly when this happened—or to whom—but the coincidence of our trip with Indonesia's Independence Day gave rise to one spine-tinglingly awkward exchange with a curious (or wry-humoured) taxi driver. Having answered a stream of questions about his country's upcoming celebration plans, the driver enquired politely as to when the UK would next celebrate our own Independence Day. Nervous laughter ensued.

But back on Medewi’s main street, gratefully far from bowdlerised colonial history lessons, three human-sized backpacks with legs were flagging down their first ride of the day. A green mitsubishi minivan, minus its door, trundled onto the hard shoulder (gravel pit). A smiling madman with a high-pitched Looney Tunes voice hopped out, and charged us 30,000 rupiah (£1.48) for the pleasure. Having watched him shove our backpacks in a temperamental looking boot, we clambered in for two hours of terror.

Separated from Toby by several cardboard boxes of “Extra Fancy Red Delicious Apples,” Lottie and I had a front row seat to the driver's successive cackling phone calls as he veered from side-to-side overtaking HGVs like Baby Mario. It was also seemingly half-bus half-Ocado van, because he kept stopping at local fruit stores to deliver loads of aforementioned apples and white grapes. People looked quizzically at Lottie and I as we sat beside this man like his two fruit-seller apprentices. I felt like breaking into a chorus of “Who Will Buy My Sweet Red Rosy Apples?” What felt like several years of my life later, the bus came to a stop with no more fruit to unload. Deducing that we were his next delivery, we waved farewell, rescued our backpacks, and disembarked in Gilimanuk along a road with about thirty-five ferry ticket booths.

A lucky dip. We walked to the one with the biggest queue of Indonesians, and purchased blue slips of paper that (apparently) converted to tickets at the terminal? At the terminal, this was indeed the case, and—a complicated sequence of turnstiles and QR code scans later—we were on the foot passenger pier, looking out to a turquoise sea so clear you could see dozens of fish darting around the pillars. Unfortunately, the beauty of nature failed to bring us much peace. As we stood, watching an incoming ferry wobble into port, all separately trying to forget about the sinking along this particular route in July, we vowed to find life jackets on board—just in case.

As any loyal Titanic podcast addict would know, it’s never a good sign when passenger lists outnumber the available life jackets. It's an even worse sign when this meagre supply of life jackets are trapped in a wooden cupboard pinned shut by stacks of suitcases. We seated ourselves as close as possible to this cupboard in the hopes that a) we could be at the front of the queue for emergency flotation; and b) that Toby could pull an Incredible Hulk and fling enough suitcases for us to access said emergency flotation. I am nonetheless pleased to report that our voyage passed without catastrophic incident, its only disturbance being a vaguely uncomfortable cameo from the angry Frenchwoman (distinct from the Kate Winslet kind of French girl) we'd had a standoff with on the Komodo boat trip—tldr: she felt her and her boyfriend were entitled to a berth with four bunks and an extra bed; in response, we staged a sit-in until she slunk off to a private balcony suite that I think the captain kept free to placate his grumpiest passengers). Thankfully, she didn't stop to chat for long and we resorted to stealing glances at each other from opposite sides of the ferry.

Banyuwangi. Port town. East coast of Java. What can I say? We went for one thing—to climb Mt. Ijen. Would I go back? It's unlikely. After an underwhelming lunch in an deserted restaurant, and enduring a pitch from an aspiring TikTok DJ, we did what everyone in Banyuwangi appeared to be doing on Independence Day and headed to the mall (this would become a frequent excursion activity over the next three weeks). There was little to see beyond huge sacks of cheetos, but Lottie purchased a fetching stripy jumper and I sniffed out a cappuccino (the latter being another recurring event)

Back at our Banyuwangi homestay, and it all began to feel a little bleak. Our room was a damp and dimly lit boxroom in a bungalow terrace, not unlike the kind of midwest motel staked out by rogue FBI agents with murky pasts in Netflix Originals. The place was empty save for our sweet young host who was definitely not called Alvin, but that was unfortunately what we all heard and memorised from his introduction.

Over the next twenty-four hours, in a manner we felt was befitting to the stagnant atmosphere, we hunkered down and ticked off a LOT of travel admin: deciding on our route through Java; choosing a hostel in our next stop, Malang; and whatsapping a tour company chatbot to book our ascent up Ijen. The most significant chunk of myself and Lottie's time, however, was spent trying to book train tickets. Tried the website, failed, led to an app store link. Downloaded an app, failed, more than six booking portals, all in Indonesian. Held Lottie's GoogleTranslate screen capture over my phone. Slow, painful success via the slow and painful passenger details forms.

After Lottie and I had picked up the most important shards of our sanity from the ant-infested tiled flooring, we caved to our worst instincts and ordered a GrabFood (Java's UberEats) macdonalds to line our stomachs for the nightmare we had scheduled for 23:30 that night. We couldn’t delay the inevitable for long. A few saver menu meals, half an episode of The Grand Tour, and a bad nap later, it was time to face the music.

Waved off by Alvin, we were bundled into a white van. The first stop was (allegedly) a clinic where we were each summoned for an interview and awarded the health certificates necessary to partake in the Ijen hike. A lady pretended to record mine and Toby's blood oxygen levels (but not Lottie’s?); asked us our weight (every certificate had this pre-filled as 61kg regardless of your reply); and ended with the catch-all diagnostic question: “Do you have asthma or have you ever hyperventilated?” I shook my head to the time of my own heart and began breathing heavily through my nose.

Health certificates secured, it was a ninety minute drive to the foot of Ijen. The mountain itself didn't open to hikers until 2AM, so we sat for an hour in the backroom of a cafe with a motley crew that included a cowboy-hatted Indiana Jones wannabe and three boys loudly discussing their time at Durham. By the time 2AM rolled around, we were so keen to get away from this lot that we set off at a scampering pace. A pace that—somehow—we maintained to the crater rim.

I should explain that Mount Ijen is an active volcano famous for being one of two places in the world that you can see blue fire (the other is at the Dallol volcano in Ethiopia). This is a natural phenomenon by which sulphuric gases, escaping through cracks in a volcanic crater, combust in glow neon blue flames. Seeing this requires climbing first to the crater’s edge, and then bouldering down into the crater itself, dodging rockfalls, plumes of suphur, and sulphur miners in Pokemon t-shirts carrying 90+kg loads on their shoulders up from the interior. See, it is giving Mordor.

The initial route up was an ordeal in itself. Not only was the gradient unforgiving, but we had the added challenge of dodging elderly manifestations of Hercules who were dragging the infirm and the unfit up to the top in metal wheelbarrows. I still don't know how this was possible. These grandfathers must have all been bitten by radioactive spiders or something. They darted up and down, seeking more passengers with shouts of “Lamborghini! Lamborghini!” It was almost as terrifying to walk behind one of these contraptions as it must have been to be encased within one.

Once at the top, we strapped on our heavy duty gas masks and entered the bottleneck of death, squeezing out a narrow toothpaste line of hikers pointing down into the crater. There was no chance of turning back. The heavy breathing intensified and I began empathising with Darth Vader. By the light of my headlamp, it was hard to discern quite how far down we went. At one point, we were misled into a sulphur mining pit. Maskless workers motioned to us through the haze to turn around and we panickedly obeyed. Finally, approaching a cluster of people and deducing it to be the bottom, we took some obligatory blue fire pics (very cool) but spent most of our time wiping tears from tightly-shut red eyes as stinging gusts of sulphur engulfed us. As we swivelled for the gruelling climb out of the crater, a particularly thick cloud overwhelmed us, and I lost sight of Lottie's boots ahead of me. Everything disappeared into smoke, prompting Toby to grab my shoulder and push me in the right direction. Coughing and spluttering, we found Lottie a few metres ahead in a similarly disoriented state and agreed that had been (fingers crossed) the closest we'd ever get to understanding how Great War soldiers felt as mustard gas hit the trenches.

The way back up was even hairier than the way down because we were having to pass the latecomers (aka the less competent hikers some of whom were skidding on their backsides and further eroding the threadbare path) on single-file ledges. Dawn was breaking too, which meant we could see dangers that we'd only imagined on the descent in full technicolour. These included a vast blue crater lake whose acidity was measured by a Canadian explorer in 2008 at a pH of 0.13, making it one of the most acidic places on Earth (because it wasn't dangerous enough already). Nonetheless, having somewhat recuperated at the rim while watching a pretty sunrise, we sloped back down to the sea of people carriers, and were whisked back to Banyuwang with a breezy sense of accomplishment and an aftertaste of jetlagged mania.

Having optimistically thought we'd just send the all-nighter and bounce back, we had booked our first of two trains to Malang for 11AM. To rally the spirits, Lottie and Toby decided to order some maccies' hashbrowns, awkwardly smuggled past Alvin whose kind offer of chicken soup we had apologetically refused by saying we weren't hungry. Catching the train was more straightforward than booking it—praise the Lord—and our first KAI railway journey was smooth and picturesque. Lazy rivers, emerald rice paddies, and stop-motion pictures of kids flying kites flashed past the windows.

Our intention had been to get a train north-east to Surabaya, and then a southward connection to Malang. Unfortunately, it became increasingly clear from numerous blank faces and internet searches that our second train may not exist beyond the KAI app, so we alighted at a closer station to Malang and caught a Grab through a rainstorm for the journey's last leg. This is significant only because—in the midst of this impulsive transit—we suffered the first casualty of the trip: the loss of Lottie's left walking boot (may have been the right one but specificity makes for a better story). Lottie would go on to leave no stone unturned in her search for this missing boot, emailing both the train service and station in Google-ese Indonesian to no avail. She even reported its loss to Grab in the hopes that it might be in the driver's car, but only received a notification that the driver's account had been temporarily deactivated. A week or so later, my mother (from whom Lottie had borrowed said boots) received a mysterious bouquet of flowers in the post. The accompanying letter, signed “all my love, the other boot,” entreated her not to blame Lottie, explaining it had run away entirely of its own accord. So that's that, I guess! Personally, I hope it's being used as a candle holder on the Grab driver’s mantlepiece, or being polished for domestic bliss by a Borrower-sized old woman with too many children in Bangil train station.

Well then, that bad stand-up monologue brings us to Malang, which I feel is more than enough wittering on for one sitting. I promise to be more concise in the next part (which is probably what Tolkien endeavoured with each new chapter—although thinking about it, and knowing the little I do about John Ronald Reuel, I have a nagging suspicion he cared very little about his readers’ waning patience).