Indonesia definitely needs to have a long, hard look at itself. For a country so apparently popular with tourists it does seem to have an unhealthy obsession with attractions, mainly volcanoes, which require inordinately early starts.

Yes, folks, it was another 4am wake-up call. After being greeted with a breakfast of chocolate drop sandwiches and hard boiled eggs, we set off to drive to the base of yet another volcano - this one was called Mount Ijen. I had to curb my enthusiasm to walk 3km uphill at such an ungodly hour. The path resembled one of those graphs which start with a gradual slope and then take a sharp turn upwards. Great for your bank account, not on the legs.

I may be guilty of exaggeration here but suffice to say that Duncan had resorted to telling me stories about the use of bamboo in ancient civilisations to pass the time so things were getting pretty bad. The volcano was really going to have to deliver. It did.

All the way up we were met by locals quite clearly stronger, fitter and better able to get out of bed early than us. They were already on their way down and they all carried on their shoulders what we found out later were loads of about 75kg. At this time all we knew is that they seemed to be carrying yellow polystyrene.

As we arrived at the edge of the crater, we peered into a most bizarre sight. Dried up streams of basalt ran from the ring downwards towards a turquoise lake in the middle. Towards one side sulphurous steam belched greedily out of yellow crystals; clearly this was the yellow 'polystyrene' everyone had been carrying. A make-shift factory had been set up there to chip away at the boiling hot yellow stuff and then an ant army of locals would shift the loads on their shoulders over the crater's edge and down the volcano. Back-breaking work, for $4 per load,

The scene, with this other-worldly landscape, stifling sulphurous smoke and luxurious blue lake was quite extraordinary. We walked right down into the crater and we were keen to do a loop of the lake but the smoke was intoxicating and we had to beat a retreat. It was something out of a fantastical novel but the smell and the rawness of it made us thank our lucky stars we were able to head back down to planet earth.