I could see the spirit of Raffles nodding in approval as my plan took shape. It seemed much too easy to take the 60,000Rp (£3) organised trip to see the erupting Merapi volcano. I wanted to make the journey myself; the independent traveller making his way through a foreign land with nothing to help him but a public bus which goes straight to the nearest village for a fraction of the price.

And so the plan was to get to the bus sub-terminal on the edge of town at around 3pm, get a bus to Kaliang (the nearest village), stay up there for sunset, watch the lava in the dark and get back at around 8pm. An excellent plan. I stopped at a café for lunch and was grilled by the waiter.

"Oh no, no bus to Kaliang but I find you good trip for 60,000Rp."

This can be the frustrating thing about travelling; ask a simple question and you get the answer which provides the most benefit to the person you asked. Of course, sometimes you may get a genuine answer but it’s very difficult to tell the difference. He opened his mouth to say ‘I have friend who ……..’ and so I quickly told him that I was aware of the trip but was leaving tomorrow and so couldn’t do it.

"Ahh," he nodded sagely, "maybe you get bus but last one back 5.30."

Was that true or was he just trying to put me off? Scepticism reigned so I paid my bill and marched off in what I thought was the vague direction of the bus sub-terminal.

The outskirts of Jogya were as grey and hazy as the early afternoon sky. Two miles from the centre I found a collection of dodgy looking bemos parked on a muddy lot – a bemo is a minivan with bench seats and is the main sort of public transportation in most Indonesian towns; imagine a bus the size of a Ford Fiesta. Half a dozen people were idly milling around and I asked one of them which bemo would take me to Kaliang. He looked at me dubiously and jutted his chin at a small brown twelve-seater just pulling off. I ran after it shouting.

"Kaliang? Berapa?"

The driver told me 2000Rp and I squeezed myself inside. The oldest woman in the world beckoned me to sit down and started chatting. I smiled and nodded, understanding nothing and wishing I’d made an effort to learn the language.

We rattled through the dusty suburbs picking up passengers; the old woman sharing her thoughts on the price of fruit, the state of the world economy and what she’d do with a young lad like me if she was forty years younger. ‘Must speak foreign language and look like bag of sticks’ – wasn’t quite what I’d put in the personal column.

The stopping became persistently and annoyingly regular. Women with shopping, lads with cigarettes and young muslim girls, their heads covered by crisp white headscarves. A small boy aged seven or eight, smartly dressed in his school uniform of black shorts and short-sleeved white shirt, clambered on and sat quietly, deep in his own seven or eight year old thoughts. The old woman rested her toothless head against my shoulder; her skull rattling gently from time to time. There were now seventeen people on the ‘bus’, plus the driver, plus the conductor, who was now leaning out of the back door with a wad of notes in his hand and barking instructions at the driver, passengers and anyone else within shouting distance. We stopped for another three lads. They squatted and bent and hung on and off we went. Apparently the hottest place in the world is Death Valley in the Nevada desert. Rubbish.

Several clatters, two bumps and a swerve later, the passenger count began to get a little more sensible. A chap in a wheelchair was helped off at the next stop (the wheelchair was on the roof) without the fuss that I had once seen on a bus in England. He was followed by the schoolboy who marched purposefully off home.

Gradually the bus emptied until I was the last remaining. The driver beckoned me off.

"Here?" I asked.

He nodded.

I disembarked. A village, of sorts, stretched up and down the road; a long collection of concrete buildings and wooden shacks, several possessing the creamy-whitish-grey satellite dishes that are ever-present in even the smallest outposts of south-east Asia. And of a size that would enable a Bond villain or any enemy of capitalist imperialism to track and bring down western fighter aircraft with the minimum of effort.

I looked around for a sign saying ‘volcano this way’, didn’t find it, and so began to trudge uphill; it seemed to make sense to go that way. Ten minutes later I reached a police station. The officer was lying on a couch watching TV (or possibly tracking western fighter aircraft).

"Permisi," I said. He rose tightening his belt and adjusting his gun. "How far Kaliang? Merapi?"

He looked confused.

I pointed to my watch and did a walking impression.

"Merapi? Kaliang? How far?"

He showed me seven fingers which I assumed meant minutes. I thanked him and set off. He returned to his work.

Ten minutes later and I couldn’t see anything either resembling a volcano or looking like a sign for a volcano. Two teenage girls were standing by the roadside. I walked over to them.

"Permisi. Berapa Kaliang?" They looked confused. "I want Merapi. Kaliang. How far?" I asked, pointing at my watch and doing my excellent walking impression again.

"Kaliang," stated one of them. "Ohhhhh." She pointed to a milepost on the other side of the road - ‘Klang 17KM’. I looked at it for a moment as slowly everything came clear. I was nowhere near the place. No wonder the policeman was confused (though god knows what the seven finger direction represented); and as for the bastard bus driver who took my money and then dropped me off when he’d had enough.

But you have to laugh, as did the two girls at stupid-Englishman-in-middle-of-nowhere.

I considered the situation. It seemed a good idea to ask them when the next bus was. They didn’t understand.

I tried asking them why they were waiting here and were they going to Kaliang. They didn’t understand.

I felt very stupid for not knowing the language.

I pointed to my watch and tried to do an impression of a bus (big rectangular arm movements, driving impression, ‘brum-brum-brum’ noises).

"Ohhhhh. Small car," replied one of them.

I nodded my head furiously only afterwards thinking what an absurd description of a bus this was; though given the size of them in this neck of the woods it was actually quite an accurate description. They pointed to my watch indicating twenty minutes – around 4.30.

"Small car, Kaliang to Jogya?" I asked. They indicated 5.30.

Bollocks, even if I got there I couldn’t get back. I stood there in thought for a while and had an intermittent conversation involving ‘What your name?’ and ‘Where you from?’ One of the girls wandered off and then a lad on a motorbike joined us.

"Hello," I said.

"Hello," said he.

"Where you from?"

"England"

"Oh. Where you going?"

"I want to go to Kaliang to see Merapi but no bus."

"No," he said, helpfully.

He thought a while.

"Maybe I take you."

I wondered what the catch was.

"What? You take me to Merapi?"

"Yes. We talk English…………..no money," he added.

‘Bloody hell,’ I thought. Get to Merapi, watch for around a half hour and get the last bus back. "OK" and we were off.

He introduced himself as Ecu, aged 23 (but looking 14) and a student. He wanted to practice his English as he hoped to get a job in a hotel in Jogya. We chatted about his mother (housewife) and father (businessman), education (worked really hard) and the military (not sure about military service) as we slowly wound our way up the steep hills. His motorbike seemed slightly overwhelmed at the two of us using its services but struggled on nonetheless, adopting the tone of a slightly grumpy household drill going through concrete or a large fly with some very heavy shopping.

Eventually we arrived at a viewing area overlooking deep ravines and steep limestone cliffs covered in vegetation. But it was very cloudy and my mountain of fire, apparently in the distance, was not to be seen. I asked if it was possible to get to the scientific base on the volcano but Ecu said it would take too long – so much for seeing the exploding Merapi. I considered being disappointed but was now simply grateful at getting this far.

I found out later that Merapi was one of the most active volcanoes in Indonesia and regular eruptions resulted in pyroclastic flows (fast-moving avalanches of hot ash) and lahars (mud slides) which from time to time devastated the surrounding countryside, often causing fatalities. It had even made the list of the top ten deadliest eruptions of the twentieth century when in 1930 it killed 1,369 people. Perhaps these are the kind of things I should research in advance.

We chatted about life around here and he told me about village children on the other side of the deep ravine who had to traverse this area every day to get to the road to get the bus to school – I was impressed.

"Come," he said.

I thought it was time to go but we once again climbed the steep curves and soon arrived at a village of guesthouses and cafes set in volcanic cliffs which was clearly the end of the line. I offered to buy him a coffee but he refused so I had one myself.

It’s a fearsome thing, Indonesian coffee. Ground beans are put straight into a cup, hot water poured upon them, and as much sugar as you like; get to the bottom and the sludge is like an environmental catastrophe. An even bigger treat meets those who like it white - condensed milk. Don’t stir it and it’s like drinking a black and white lava lamp; give it a stir and it’s a cross between molten steel and Baileys. Fantastic. You’ll have to staple your eyes to keep them shut.

I sipped on my lava lamp and we chatted about life in Indonesia; Ecu shrugging his shoulders in a non-committal fashion when I mentioned the current problems. He asked me about my religion. I guessed atheist might equate to satanist and I didn’t want to get into a dialogue on agnosticism. I lied.

"Christian."

"Muslim." He stated, pointing at himself.

"You pray five times each day?" I asked.

"Yes," he said, gravely, "very important."

He thought for a moment. "You drink alcohol?"

I guessed he wasn’t offering me a drink and I nodded. He quizzed me on what life was like in England with people drinking all the time. Mostly fine, I said, but with some real idiots who reacted badly to it. He grinned, seemingly unable to see the attraction of such an insidious product.

He then informed me that he would be happy to take me all the way back to Jogya. Was I grateful?!! He asked if it would be okay if we stopped in his village on the way; I was clearly not going to argue.

We set off down the steep, winding road and were soon being chased by a frenetically beeping scooter. It was two of Ecu’s friends, obviously curious.

"Where you from?" they shouted as we sped frantically around a corner.

"England," I replied.

"Ahh, David Bekkem, Lady Dee," they shouted.

"Manchester United," I replied, pointing at myself. "You?"

"Yes," they said.

They chatted away to Ecu until the village. We turned up a side road and the lads accelerated after a chicken which ran in a panic and then flung itself indignantly into a bush.

"Very bad," I shouted, smiling.

"Bad boy," they replied with broad grins.

We negotiated potholes to Ecu’s house and stopped. He pointed to the door.

"Please go in."

I pointed to my boots, remembering Javanese decorum.

"Should I take these off?"

"No. No problem."

His wooden-floored sitting room was sparsely furnished and spotlessly clean. I sat down on one of the two sofas.

He brought a large calendar over and asked if we could meet up if I returned to Jogya. We agreed on the 20^th and he told me he would take me anywhere I wanted to go. I thanked him for his kindness and gave him my home address so he could write if he wished. As we got up to leave, his mother entered the room, smiling and graceful in a long golden sarong. I shook her hand with a smile and a nod. The lads bade us farewell and we started the longish journey to Jogya.

As we sped along the thankfully quiet roads, he asked me about my girlfriend which I made up as it was bad form in Indonesia not to have one; especially as I told him I was 30 and he’d told me that Indonesian muslims should be married by then. I didn’t know what label I would have been given had I said I was single but I guessed it could have been freak, gay or communist; either way I didn’t want to risk having to walk. Ecu had a girlfriend whom he saw on Fridays and whom he intended to marry if he got the hotel job he wanted.

He asked me about life in England – everything from the royal family to the welfare state. I explained as best I could and said maybe he’d visit one day. He said it was unlikely - his pay would probably be around £2 per week for the next few years. I wondered at the definition of poverty in the UK.

He tentatively asked me if I’d give him some money so that he could put some petrol in his motorbike and we stopped at the organised chaos which passed as the local petrol station. To be fair, the forecourt itself was much the same as in Europe; it was the seemingly random queuing system that I couldn’t quite work out. We joined a scrum of motorbikes and blokes filling petrol cans (which looked suspiciously like five litre orange squash bottles) who were being tended by two attendants, one with the cash and one who was able to fill up everything in sight without stopping his flow of petrol; I could tell that in his nonchalant way he was very proud of his skill. We managed to fill our tank without any major spillage and soon we were battling through the cloudy, noisy approaches to Jalan Malioboro.

He dropped me near the guesthouse. I thanked him for his kindness and gave him a cheerful wave as he sped off into the dark evening. Wandering back to the guesthouse I decided it was time to move on. I bought a bus ticket to Bali via the smoking Mount Bromo.

My journey was finally taking on its own personality; I quite liked it.

CopyrightNickLangston-Able2000