…when An­ton dropped me at Ke­limutu – even the name sings – it was one of those heart-burst­ing days of glit­ter­ing morn­ing air and in­fi­nite vis­tas. The birds ser­e­naded, the but­ter­flies flirted, and I was all alone in one of the most beau­ti­ful places on earth. Two of Ke­limutu’s lakes are di­vided by a sin­gle wall of jagged rock. One lake I re­mem­bered as be­ing emer­ald green, the other a great pool of milk, The third, off at a dis­tance, was sticky, ox­i­dized blood. This time, though, the sib­ling lakes seemed to have bled into one an­other; they are now turquoise twins. As the clouds puffed in, smoky shad­ows flit­ted over their sur­face. I walked on up the dust-muf­fled path to the third lake, pass­ing a soli­tary grounds­man who was at­tack­ing the acres of scrub grass with a scythe the size of a Swiss Army knife. The blood lake, the one where lo­cals be­lieve old souls find their rest, had thick­ened al­most to black. I won­dered what had be­come of the souls of vir­gins and in­no­cents now that the white lake where they used to seek refuge had mor­phed to blue. Ge­ol­o­gists say these colour changes are the work of min­er­als burped up into the lakes from vents un­der the wa­ter. Though ac­cord­ing to Ke­limutu Na­tional Park’s of­fi­cial web­site, lo­cals be­lieve they are the spir­its’ re­ac­tion to the elec­tion of a mil­i­tary can­di­date as pres­i­dent of In­done­sia.

I sat for a while in a si­lence punc­tu­ated by bird­song and the oc­ca­sional buzzing in­sect. It was mid-No­vem­ber, not high tourist sea­son, but still, it seemed amaz­ing that I could have this whole ma­jes­tic scene en­tirely to my­self. No bus­loads of rich kids from pri­vate schools in Java ex­plor­ing the won­ders of their na­tion. No groups of cam­era-click­ing Ja­pa­nese tourists with a niche in­ter­est in vul­canol­ogy. Not even any gap-year back­pack­ers stor­ing up ex­otic tales for fresher’s week at uni­ver­sity in Man­ches­ter, San Fran­cisco or Berlin. I was thrilled by the soli­tude, of course. But I felt al­most of­fended on be­half of In­done­sia.
 Eliz­a­beth Pisani, In­done­sia Etc.