Minutes prior to this scene, Ted and I were subjected to a harrowing near death experience.

After packing up the bus and leaving the volcano's summit, we naturally headed down. Well, I can tell you that the smell of burning brakes is never a welcome smell, but when you are trying to get down the side of a volcano in Indonesia it is really not a good smell. The bus lost it's breaks. We began careening out of control down the mountain through a small village. I still do not believe we did not flip over when the driver cut the wheel hard right. I was sitting on the right, in the back seat with Ted on my left. Me and about a half dozen other tourists were thrown up when we went on two wheels after hitting the curb on the left. A guy on a motorcycle was right in our path but he also made a miraculous maneuver and cheated almost certain death. When the right side came back down we all got jolted again, but the truck was going significantly slower and we eventually came to a rest. There were a couple of hundred onlookers who just all seemed shocked.

We had no idea, but that road was where the next stop was, so after letting the bus cool for a few minutes, we continued on to the mountain hot spring. It was supposed to have some type of mystical healing powers or some such nonesense. I do not know what it was that was growing in there but I was afraid of some hidious thing would come oozing out of the depths to take one of my toes off. Had I not almost died 30 minutes earlier I would have never crawled into this diseased pool.