Javanese Strong Men

I've just came back after a vacation in Indonesia and I would like to share with you the most exciting moment from it: a trip to an active Vulcan Ijen.

Ijen erupted last time in 1999 and it has the biggest acid lake in the world in its crater. The crater is also a place for sulfur mining. Sulfur mining at Ijen is done in the following way. There is a sulfur gas from the vulcan, which is captured. Then it transforms in liquid form and flows through a vast pipe. It hardens and then miners hack it into pieces. After that miner put the pieces into baskets. 

Miners carry from 50 to 90 kg in those baskets to a weigh station. The way is 6 km long: 1 km up and 5 km down. The path in the crater is very hard.

For every kilo of sulfur they are paid 8 U. S. cents. Usually they make 2 round trips per day and earn around 12$/day. Besides carrying heavy weights the job is very dangerous for them because most of the miners don't have any masks.

On the other side, they earn a lot of money comparing to other people in their region and other people call them with respect "Javanese Strong Men".

For myself I made several conclusions:

1. I'm very lucky with my job and have no right to complain on it.
2. It is hard to mine sulfur on Java, the rest is easily can be done with Java.

P. S. After 1.5 years of Scala I'm back to Java.