Further Wanderings

It was well after dark when we arrived in ‘Siantar, and things didn’t start out too well.

We were urged to take a becak (kind of like a motorcycle with a sidecar) to the nearest hotel which was “far away,” but which turned out to be about 300m down the road.  Once we arrived we discovered that the hotel had a karaoke bar that kept blaring until 01:00, and when we went out for dinner we got into a monstrous row with the proprietress of a warung (small, basic restaurant) when she tried to change the agreed price of our meal after we’d ordered.  In the end she gave us the original quoted price, but slapped our fried noodles into a banana leaf (a common carry-out container in Indonesia) making it clear that we were not welcome to stay and eat there.

I suppose all of these had their silver linings though… The staff at the hotel were very friendly, the karaoke singers got better later in the evening, and the noodles were tasty

An “Indonesian Tow Truck” on the main street in Berastagi

The next morning we got up and hit the road again for the final leg of our journey to Danau Toba.  As it turned out, we weren’t that far away, and the trip on a rickety old bus (the driver used a big elastic band to hold the transmission in fourth gear) only took about an hour and a half, including numerous stops to pick up huge jugs of home-made palm wine destined, like us for the lakeside town of Parapat.

At Parapat we made one final attempt to find an ATM that would work with our cards but this failed, so we took the ferry over to Samosir Island in the middle of the lake with fairly limited funds on hand.

Lake Toba is actually a giant volcanic caldera (a huge crater formed by the collapse of an underground magma chamber following a huge volcanic eruption) and the largest volcanic lake on Earth (at 100km x 30km x 505m deep it’s also one of the deepest lakes in the world.)  Samosir Island, where we were headed, was created when the magma chamber beneath the lake began to refill and now rises 700m above the lake surface and coveres 630 square kilometres, making it world’s largest island within a lake within an island.

Ferries on Danau (Lake) Toba.  Instead of traditional horns, these used sirens, hooters, or even the sort of electronic music used by Canadian ice cream trucks to get one’s attention.  (Occaisionally under some lighting conditions my camera does something really odd with the white balance, which is usually annoying, but sometimes produces interesting effects)

Samosir Island in general, and the village of Tuk Tuk in particular, was once a major tourist destination.  Then, in the 1990s and early 2000s the flow of visitors dried up as foreign tourists (especially Australians) became wary of visiting Indonesia due to internal conflicts and the 2002 Bali bombings.  Which means that visitors like us experienced the pleasure of having the place almost to ourselves, alongside the oddity of being in a large tourist resort almost devoid of visitors (I would estimate that at one point tuktuk had hotel rooms for one to two thousand, but during our stay had only perhaps 100 visitors.)

Looking from Tuk Tuk village (which sits on a peninsula) across to the main bulk of Samosir Island.  Like the sides of the lake/crater, Samosir rises very rapidly out of the lake

While on the island we did very little.  Our days were spent sitting around reading by the lakeside, going in for an occaisional swim (the water was a great temperature-just slightly cool) and planning what we were going to have for lunch and dinner.  Occaisonally we’d have a chat with one of the local Batak people, very friendly and hostpitable folks who had done well by the tourist industry and were trying their best to cope with its near disappearance.

 

A pavillion (in something approximating traditional Batak style) on the shores of Danau Toba

Me swimming in Danau Toba.  The lake bottom was quite weedy, but due to its volcanic origins, the lake became very deep very quickly, and I only ever noticed the weeds when climbing up the ladder out of the water

Part of this inactivity was due to the fact that (especially since we weren’t keen on riding a motorcycle) there was little to do on Samosir.  Part of it was due to the fact that doing this was precisely why we (and most others) visited Toba.  And part of it was because on day two of our visit, I went swimming with my wallet in my back pocket and had it fall out, presumably sinking to the (surprisingly deep, even near the shore) bottom, thus leaving us without the money to do much more even if we’d wanted to.  Nonetheless, we still thoroughly enjoyed our time at Danau Toba, and were a bit sad that, even with careful husbanding, our lack of funds forced us to cut our visit short by one day.

Magic mushrooms were for sale all over Tuk Tuk village.  Odd, given Indonesia’s extraordinarily strict laws surrounding most drugs

Parapat Market.  We had a delicious peanut and caramel pancake while wandering around here waiting for our bus to leave

Our next (and, indeed, final) destination in Sumatra was the town of Berastagi, 1300m up in the Karo highlands.  The trip there involved a bit of backtracking.  Backtracking is frustrating anywhere, but in Sumatra was especially irritating.  As readers may have gathered from reading previous entries, transport in that part of Indonesia left much to be desired.  There was one reasonably good road on the island, the Trans-Sumatran Highway.  This was a paved, 2 lane highway with only the odd crack or pothole, and even the occaisional re-grading or bridge to minimize the amount of ups and downs and twists and turns.  Any other road on the island was a big step downhill, as evidenced by the fact that the approximately 350km trip from Banda Aceh to Ketambe involved 17 hours on the road.

To make matters worse, the long hours spent on buses were made miserably uncomfortable by conditions inside.  Buses were invariably filled with cigarette smoke (70% of Indonesian men smoke, and they can and do light up EVERYWHERE) and blaring Indonesian techno or pop music.

It wasn’t all bad though: the vehicles themselves were usually fairly comfortable, and only occaisonally filled beyond capacity.  And the Indonesian ballads were far more agreeable than the high-pictched whine of most pop music from mainland southeast Asia.

Enough complaining.  On to something more agreeable.

The cabbage monument, Berastagi.  An odd piece of statury, if understandable given the town’s importance as a fruit and vegetable trans-shipment point

Berastagi. 

Due to the elevation the weather in Berastagi was wonderfully refreshing.  And there was plenty to do there, both due to the nature of the town AND due to the fact that we finally had the money to make up for lost spending in Danau Toba.

One activity of the later sort was my getting a haircut.  We picked one of the town’s several barbers at random and he gave me the best value haircut I’d ever had.  It cost just over $1, took more than one hour, included a thorough beard trim, used nothing but scissors and a straight razor, and came with the addded bonus of the barber’s flamoyantly gay friends offering me massages, singing, and wiggling their bottoms as they danced along to the music on the radio.

One of the Berastagi-specific activities was the climb up Mt. Sibayak.  I didn’t really know what to expect when we left, but it was one of the best walks of its type I’d ever done.  The majority of the climb up was easy (all but the last couple of hundred metres being on paved road.)  Once there, the views our over the surrounding the top of the mountain were good.  But they were hardly worth looking at, as the steaming cauldron of the volcano crater took one’s breath away (figuratively and, due to the stench of sulphur in the air, almost literally.)  Lunch at the crater rim was followed by a tougher, steeper walk back down through the forest and then a stop a some developed hot springs near the bottom.  Bliss I tell you.  Bliss!

The crater, Mt. Sibayak.  The dozens of rock-messages in the lake make it obvious how accessible this other-worldly environment is

Looking up at the crater rim, Mt. Sibayak

Sulphur encrusted fumerole, Mt. Sibayak.  So much sulphur was spewed from the volcano’s fumeroles that it was harvested by local residents.  They used long bamboo poles with bowls tied to the end to scoop sulphur crystals up from the innards of the fumeroles

After a long day’s hike, a big meal was more than welcome and Berastagi was happy to oblige.  Berastagi’s main reason for being was as a market town for the surrounding rich agricultural land, which meant that delicious fruits and vegetables were in abundance.  In three days there, Sarah and I ate 2.5kg of passionfruit (where else in the world can you just sit down and eat a kilo of passionfruit!) along with similar amounts of mangosteen and mandarins.  We complemented these delicious sweet fruits with another local specialty, avocadoes.  Every morning we’d make a two-avocado bowl of guacamole for breakfast, and one night we even tried a mixture of chocolate and avocado, blended into a rich, tasty (if odd) shake.

I have NO idea what these plants were.  Cactuses?  Young palms?

Mt. Sinabung.  Walking through the fruit and vegetable fields surrounding Berastagi wasn’t quite as impressive as climbing volcanoes, but was quite pleasant

The actual meals in Berastagi (as in most of Indonesia) were almost as good.  The food from small restaurants and street carts was of variable appeal (it included a lot of unpleasant looking things like battered and deep fried salted-preserved fish) but almost every meal we picked for ourselves in Indonesia turned out well.  The staples of nasi goreng and mie goreng (fried rice and noodles) could easily have got boring, but they, along with almost every other dish, showed a fascinating variation as we travelled from one town to the next.  Everywhere we went the same delicious spicy and savoury foods were available, but all prepared with a distinctly local take.

An oddly named beverage.  The name wasn’t entirely inappropriate, however, as the drink was kind of like a grapefruit flavoured Gatorade.  Other beverages we tried while in Berastagi included Bandrek Susu (kind of like a strong ginger tea with sweetened condensed milk) and local palm wine (sour.  Pretty unpleasant tasting, actually.)

Mmm…. Guacamole.  We even made guac with a few avocadoes we’d found on the ground during our stay at Danau Toba!

This diverse homogineity was found a parallel in the languages of Sumatra.  Each region had its own local language (several dialects of Acehnese, Gayo, Batak…) but virtually everyone also spoke Bahasa Indonesia (literally “Indonesian Language.”) Which was just as well, because while many of the local languages were very complex, but Bahasa Indonesia was blissfully simple.  It may well be the simplest language in the world to learn.  It’s written in the Latin alphabet, is not tonal, is pronounced just as it’s written, verbs are not conjugated, it contains no tenses, and even few plurals.  It doesn’t even have a verb “to be.”  To try to give an idea of how simple Bahasa Indonesia is the English sentence “They are the nice ladies who went to the store.” would come out something like:  They lady-lady nice go store yesterday.  By the time we left Indonesia I was actually forming complete, gramatically correct sentences (if with a limited vocabulary.)  Which would prove particularly useful in our next destination, Malaysia, as the languages of Indonesia and Malaysia were almost identical.

 

These floral/fluoro signs popped up along roadsides all over Sumatra.  They were sent as gifts for weddings or other special events

The countryside around Berastagi.  Aside from agriculture, the hills around Berastagi were filled with big, fancy hotels that served as getaways for well to do Medan residents

After one final night in Berastagi eating delicious Indonesian street food, we woke up early and caught a taxi down to Medan, then bus out to the port of Belawan (thus avoiding spending the night in Medan, which from what we’d seen and heard was a pretty dirty, boring and unsafe place.)  Just under three weeks after we’d crossed the Straits of Melacca from east to west, we borded a fast ferry with a capacity of 200 passengers and crossed one of the world’s busiest shipping lanes in the opposite direction, back to Penang, Malaysia.

Buffs on the roof!

Tags: Berastagi, Danau Toba, Indonesia, Llew Bardecki, Sumatra, Travel

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