One Saturday afternoon, probably nestled between ITV wrestling and an awful Airport ‘77 disaster movie, I sat down to watch the 1968 adventure movie Krakatoa: East of Java, unfurl before my wide, seven-year-old eyes. It was 1981, and I was about to become obsessed with volcanoes.
To this day, I don't remember a single thing about the plot, but I do remember telling my mum, "One day I’m going to climb that volcano," before running to find Grandfather's atlas. Published in 1925, it was as big as a broadsheet and as heavy as Moses' stone tablets. Blowing away the dust, I opened it to The Dutch East Indies... modern-day Indonesia.
Scanning the hand-drawn contours and coastlines, I was miffed to find no volcanic island east of Java. "Muuuuum! Gumpah’s map is wrong!" I bellowed towards the kitchen. Krakatoa was nowhere to be seen, not even with my spy’s magnifying glass. But then, in old-fashioned calligraphy, on the wrong side of Java, there it was… “The Site of Krakatoa,” west of Java.
West? Someone was wrong, and I was going to get to the bottom of who….
This was before the internet, so trips to the local library revealed that the movie producers knew Krakatau was east of Java, but believed Krakatoa: East of Java sounded more exotic. Liars! How could they do this to me?
Worse, all these leather-bound old maps either labeled “The Site of Krakatoa” or showed no Krakatoa at all. That was because the eruption in the mistitled film had ripped the island asunder. Balls! I thought... My days as Indiana Jones were over. However, my lifelong fascination with all things volcanic was just beginning...
To cut millions of years of plate tectonics and subduction zone movement short, Krakatoa erupted on the 26th and 27th of August 1883 with the force of 13,000 Hiroshima A-bombs or 200 megatonnes of TNT. The explosions would have deafened anyone standing within 10 miles, ruptured sailors' eardrums on RMS Norham Castle, 40 miles away, and were heard as far away as Perth, Western Australia, 1,900 miles to the south, and Rodrigues near Mauritius, 3,000 miles west-south-west. The island ripping herself apart was the loudest sound ever to be heard in the history of mankind.
Over the decades, dozens of facts piqued my interest, many from Simon Winchester's excellent 2003 book Krakatoa: The Day The World Exploded.
The volcano shot 13 cubic kilometers of ash 50 miles into the atmosphere at 1,600 mph; the shockwave reverberated seven times around the globe, and pyroclasts rode across the Sunda Strait on cushions of air like nuclear hovercrafts to engulf Javan and Sumatran villages. The fast-moving clouds of gas and volcanic ash, 120-foot tsunami waves, and the falling tephra killed at least 36,000 people.
Further afield, the tsunamis affected the tides in the English Channel, ejecta created halos around the sun and moon, and a micro-ice age gripped the globe for the next five years. In California, the San Francisco Fire Department was called to a fire in the west of the city, but arrived at the coast to find no fire, just a burning red sky. In his native Norwegian skies, artist Edvard Munch described melancholy-inducing "Clouds like blood and tongues of fire" and a "great, unending scream piercing through nature." It’s believed the red skies influenced his most famous work.
Even better were the legends; the tale of the German man who rode a 40-meter tsunami on the back of a crocodile before being dumped safely on terra firma. The steamboat Berouw, being deposited within dense jungle miles inland, tales of human skeletons melded to rafts of pumice sailing themselves across the Indian Ocean to be discovered on East African shores a year later.
Over two devastating days, and four globe-shattering eruptions, millions of years' worth of mantle and lava made their way to the surface to become a colossal pressure-cooker waiting to go off. On August 27th, the island collapsed into the caldera, and Krakatoa was no more. That’s the reason those old library maps only showed the site of Krakatoa, or no island at all. It was completely gone.
Until, that is, two years after my grandfather’s 1925 atlas was published. For, in the dying days of 1927, debris was witnessed spouting from the ocean above the collapsed caldera. This debris continued until January 26th, 1928 when the rim of a new volcanic cone emerged from below sea level. By 1930, a new island volcano rose above the waterline, and Anak Krakatau, the Son of Krakatoa, was born…
Jakarta is one of the nicest airports I’ve ever been through. Instead of the usual nondescript, grey nothingness, vibrant turquoise terracotta tiles adorn the walls; musicians play traditional Javan pentamic-scale Gamelan music, and polite signs remind visitors of the DEATH SENTENCE FOR DRUG TRAFFIKERS.
Outside, waiting by the pre-arranged, ubiquitous bowing Ronald McDonald, I was greeted by Doni, my Indonesian expert volcano guide for the next ten days. So far, we had only communicated by e-mail, and this, coupled with his years of volcanology studies, made me think he'd be a serious academic, an uber-geek with one of those annoying fact-regurgitating brains. I couldn't have been further from the mark…
Doni thought I would be a 60-year-old Englishman sporting a Panama hat, a short-sleeved shirt, a fawn-colored linen suit, socks with sandals, and an umbrella, briefcase, and a copy of the Financial Times. He, too, couldn't have been further from the mark. In my mind, I was no Marcus Brody, I was a 4x4 jeep driving, heavy-metal T-shirt-wearing Indiana Jones!
Sitting in a café with his fixer friend Sirki, sipping on heart-palpitation-inducing Java coffee, complete with dirty grinds, I asked what it was like to stand on a volcano when it erupted. After a moment’s thought, Doni replied with a long, one-word answer. I won’t tell you what it is just yet, but it sounded like something an Indonesian Dick Van Dyke might say.
The US Geological Survey had recently placed Anak Krakatau on volcanic alert and recommended not venturing within several miles of the island, but I had come a long, long way. The thought of finally seeing my first volcano up close filled me with joy, but following a six-hour drive from traffic-jammed Jakarta, a two-hour boat ride with Javan fishermen across the Sunda Strait still stood in my way.
We careened through the jade green water for an hour before the Son of Krakatoa slowly revealed herself through the mist. As we neared the volcano, I regressed in age with excitement, back to that wide-eyed eight-year-old, drumming the side of the boat with my palms and whooping with delight. The mist parted to unveil her perfect form until she loomed over us, and the captain brought the engine to an idle.
Bobbing up and down, I stared at the behemoth with wonderment. It resembled a giant grey-brown chocolate lava cake rising from a sea of green custard, the caldera a giant spoonful the Indonesian Gods had scooped away. The local fishermen informed us there had been major eruptions just three days before. We dropped anchor and waited… and waited… drank cold Java coffee from a flask… and waited some more while everyone smoked hideous clove kretek cigarettes… and we waited.
Nothing. Nada. Zip. Zero. Zilch. Best go climb it.
We motored past monstrous lapilli rock formations, formed by numerous lava-flows, and as jagged and sharp as sword-edges. The captain moored the boat, and we waded onto land; my lily-white feet contrasting perfectly with the black volcanic sand, making me feel quite out of place. No tourists here; a welcome sign and a makeshift shelter hut were the only signs of humankind. It was plain that few have ever set foot here; apart from scientists, locals, a swimming pig perhaps, and the odd adventurer.
Leaving Sirkip on the shore, Doni and I changed footwear and walked the slight incline as pine trees swayed and whooshed, hypnotically calling to the wind. The small copse of green undergrowth soon gave way, and before us rose a dark and desolate lunar landscape, silent and chilling.
Slipping on the talus escarpment in my canvas Converse All Stars and stopping three times for much-needed water, we made the old seismological observation station after a twenty-minute climb. It had been destroyed by lava bombs earlier in the year, paving-stone-sized slabs of molten rock ejected by the erupting vent, which cool and solidify on their earthward-bound journey, unwittingly becoming nature's cannonballs.
Some were too heavy to lift, yet had been thrown half a mile by the sheer power of the insides of the earth. Although I'd have liked to have seen some lava-bombs, I hoped there would be none today...
We hiked to the rim of the 1927 crater, two-thirds of the way up her impressive 300 meters, and sat to take on more water. I listened intently as Doni pointed out the islands of Rakata, Verlaten, and Lang, which we could see before us, that had once made up the island of Krakatoa before 1883. And then, tick, tick, tick… Booom! With no word of warning, suddenly she erupted. The ground shook, a grey pyroclast blasted into the air, and an avalanche of scree smashed its way down the mountain towards us.
We were standing only a few hundred meters from the vent and visions of a 200 mph, 1,200-degree-Celsius, Pompeii-style pyroclastic flow danced across my mind. My body froze as every cell in my body screamed for me to run, but Doni just stood there beaming at me with that wide, Javan grin.
With the words of World War One poet Wilfred Owen reverberating round my mind, “The Gas. The Gas. Quick, boys, an ecstasy of fumbling.” I scrambled in my pockets for what I needed… my digital camera. Then, those few seconds of panic were replaced with awe.
Thousands of cubic meters of ash, dust, rock, steam, smoke, pumice, and noxious gas spewed hundreds of feet into the baby-blue sky, blocking out the sun. My mouth was in my stomach, but there was no real danger. I watched, humbled by the devastating power unleashed before me as the grey-black cloud, which started its life as a belch in the belly of the earth, was taken up and away by the easterly wind.
I had just stood on a volcano as it erupted!
Later that afternoon, a mile or three across the ocean, on the shore of Rakata Island, Doni and Sirkip set up tents with a military sense of having done this more than once before. My tent and hammock faced the volcano, providing the perfect view. Two more massive eruptions gripped the mountain and, as darkness grew, with a giant monitor lizard for company, the fishermen and Doni prepared a fireside dinner of sweetcorn soup and cheese, tomato, and garlic omelettes “to keep the vampyre away.”
Truth be told, I was waiting for a full-blown Strombolian eruption - a firework display of molten lava jetting every which way, lava-bombs and volcanic lightning but not even Doni's favourite song; Phil Collins' "I Can Feel It Coming in the Air Tonight" on my mini-laptop and portable speakers could anger the Gods into a display.
I swung in the hammock, being eaten alive by mosquitoes, a tad reluctant to get into the tent, but after Rakata Island's very first disco, one too many Bintang beers, kretek cigarettes, and a scramble to move the tents inland to escape the invading tide, it was time for bed.
With a squint, I could still just make out the outline of the volcano - black against a blue-black sky, but Morpheus was calling me to slip into his arms. I zipped up the tent, put my head down, and eventually fell asleep. Every few minutes, I would wake, but then, after one hour’s sleep, I woke with a jolt.
An Alien xenomorph bug as big as my fist had landed on the semi-transparent opening, its feelers clawing at the zip. Things with four legs that had come to eat me moved around outside, knocking pots, pans, and plates over. I couldn’t breathe. I was having some form of panic attack. And I needed to pee. Badly.
Adrenaline pulsed through my veins, my heart thumped in its ribcage, but I had no other option than to brave the horrors outside. I located a tree with my torch, but could hardly pee straight with fear. In the blackness, THINGS were moving on all sides.
Waves pummelled the shore with such force that the whole beach shook with each break, the noise tremendous and deafening. The shadowy forest moved unnaturally, and the trees narrowed like a Spielberg zoom every time I trained my torch on them. The waves blocked my front exit, the trees left, right, and behind, but my heart rate was finally slowing. Petrified but safe on all four sides, the only angle I didn't have covered was... up.
Gingerly craning my head, four feet above me, glued upside-down from a branch hung a bat the size of a pterodactyl. Its vampiric eyes opened and stared down at me. Black eyes, like a doll's eyes...
Mouth agog and tongue lolling, I blasted a salvo of garlic omelette breath at the giant bat. The winged denizen of the night recoiled in horror, flapping off into the darkness with a shriek. It was at this precise moment that the face-hugger from my tent decided to fall onto my shoulder, its alien proboscis and insectoid antenna licking at my cheek and ear.
I crooked my head and flicked with my free hand, left-hooking it onto the sand. It looked up at me and I swear it growled... yes, growled at me. Instinctively, I kicked sand at it, scrambled back into my tent, and zipped the flap closed. I knew the only release from this, my usual antidote to vampires and insomnia, was daylight.
With one full hour’s sleep, I unzipped the tent to see Anak Krakatau erupting again in the distance. Doni brought some Farang food—half a melon and a banana pancake —and very kindly asked if I was okay because I “looked like shit.” He let me doze in the hammock for another hour before the boat left for the mainland and my next volcano, Merapi, Papandayang or Mount Bromo, but that’s another story for another day.
I had climbed my first volcano and survived the night on a mysterious island full of alien insects and giant vampire bats. Doni was right, being on an erupting volcano was "SuperBloodyMaximumFuckingCrazy" and in two short days I had become a real-life explorer, a bona fide adventurer. So from this day forth, mum... you can call me Indy.