Blogs from Berastagi, Sumatra, Indonesia, Asia - page 2

After making the difficult but inevitable decision to leave beautiful Toba, I continued northwards on a 4h ride to the hill-side town of Berastagi. Like many hill-side towns that I've visited the past year, this one was also established by former colonial rulers looking to escape from the searing heat of the lowlands. In this case, it was the Dutch of course. And as far as hill-side towns go, Berastagi doesn't seem to be that different from the rest, especially with regards to its pleasant, temperate climate. A small town essentially centred along just two main streets, Berastagi nevertheless packs some kind of buzz from a busting local Karo population, as well as Medan-Chinese weekenders, whose presence becomes increasingly apparent as we venture closer to the regional capital. The uniquely-accented Hokkien (a Chinese dialect) very similar ... read more

Orangutan: Tick! After waiting an hour at the feeding platform, no takers for bananas and milk so hitched onto a 3 hour trek further and higher into the rainforest. Still no luck after 2 hours when an extraordinary 20 year old 'gentleman of the trees' swung languidly across our path and elegantly snaffled a banana! He then continued some acrobatics for about 20 minutes before getting bored with us and swinging away into the canopy. Amazing! A hard act to follow really. It was followed by the appearence of 5 Thomas leaf monkeys ( we were told) with the most amazing faces and also partial to bananas like me. They peel them very deftly unlike me. That was yesterday. This is today. After 140 km ride , the last 45 going uphill from 50 to 1400m ... read more

After our jungle trekking in Bukit Lawang we came to Berastagi to chill out for a few days. It's a fairly large (population 600,000) city set among picturesque mountains. Everywhere we turn there is a peak of one mountain or another off in the distance. Similar to the mountains of Java, it seems like we are almost living in the clouds. With the higher altitude, the weather here is slightly cooler and we seem to still get rain most nights - we are beginning to think it's a Sumatran thing. However, most mornings we woke up to sunshine and had three near perfect days to wander around town. The first thing we wanted to see was the fruit market! It is only about a 10 minute walk from where we were staying so we checked that ... read more

When i was 8 there was the school trip to ontario place at the end of the semester... pretty lame in retrospect. What i will never forget is viewing my first IMAX movie in the Cinesphere, The Pacific Ring of Fire. Mountainous volcanoes spewing lava all around tropical islands and filmed from a helicopter; it blew my young sense away and made me want to see these vast wild landscapes. Now we're here and its not quite as titillating as i thought it would be when i was a child but we did climb our first active volcano yesterday and it was beautiful and surreal. A relatively smaller mountain at 2095m above sea level, gunung (mountain) Sibayak was once taller but long ago blew its peak off and is now a wide Caldera with several peaks ... read more

So with an undeniably queasy stomach we decided that Toba had held us captive for too long and it was about time to try our hand at a spot of volcano climbing in Berastagi. So we headed off on the boat to the main road out of Toba where we tried to negotiate a reasonable ride to Berastagi. We ended up getting a taxi for about 4 pounds for a three hour journey, which in hindsight really was too good to be true. The man set off at about 70 mph along these pot-holed roads, he thought that the highway code was an endorsement to drive alongside other vehicles on the wrong side of the road and waiting until blind bends to overtake was pure hilarity to him (and I thought I was a bad driver!?) ... read more