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Published: March 3rd 2010
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Fortunately, of the eight of us on our jungle trek, seven were heading to Lake Toba so we decided to hire a private car between us, thus saving us another ‘experience’ involving men accidentally spitting in my face while I attempt to wrap my legs around the back of my head and old lady trying to squeeze in and sit with her bum in my face. I feel once is an experience, twice is just masochistic. Anyway split between seven of us the fare was very reasonable and the journey surprisingly pleasant taking in some fantastic scenery.
Lake Toba is the largest lake in Southeast Asia set in the collapsed caledra of an extinct volcano surrounded by mountains (thanks to Lonely Plant for the description) and is really stunning, the views as we weaved our way down the mountains towards it were amazing. In the middle of the Lake is an island called Samosir, which I believe (but don’t quote me on this,) is the largest island in a lake in the world, roughly the size of Singapore - this was our destination.
Once aboard the boat, a friendly man from Samosir Cottages turned up and quickly managed to
persuade the whole boat to come and stay there, when we turned up we were pleasantly surprised as it was a beautiful place right on the lake front, providing us with probably the best value rooms we have come across in the whole of Indonesia, and had WiFi!
The people who live in this area of Sumatra are called the Batak people and famous for their hospitality, dancing and general friendliness, so typically Rachel and I managed to have a storming argument with the manager within about 10 minutes are turning up. He told us the most unbelievable story about why the WiFi wasn’t free when we had been told it was on the ferry, something along the lines of today was the first day they got WiFi and it had been free for the first 3 hours they had it which had finished 10 minutes before we turned up, therefore we would need to buy a card to use it. We were raging, convinced that he was simply trying to fleece us out of some more money, probably not helped by the very early start we had endured and were all ready to storm out. However when we
spoke to another guest who had a net book they told us his implausible story was in fact true and they had only got WiFi that very day and it had only been free the first three hours that did end about 10minutes before we arrived. So tails between our legs we shuffled up to the man mumbled an apology and brought a card, I’m certain he hated us for the rest of our stay.
That evening after a few a drinks with our friends from the trek, Rachel got a touch merry and started telling this poor startled couple her entire life story, without pausing for breath. After about twenty minutes of them politely listening they unsurprisingly bid a hasty withdrawal. After I had made a rather poor attempt at Batak dancing we thought perhaps we should do the same. The next day was a rather boring one again involving planning the rest of our time in Indonesia and buying flights and such. The real excitement of our time in Toba started at about 5am the next morning when Rachel awoke feeling rather unwell, it soon transpired that Ashleigh was in much the same boat and neither of
them was able to leave their room for the next day and a half. I, you will be glad to hear, was fine, so had a rather enjoyable couple of days sitting by myself, having a few beers, playing on the internet and watching football. I was grateful for the peace and quiet which was only occasionally shattered when I had to run around getting washing, water, medicine and toilet roll for Rachel and Ashleigh.
By the third day both had recovered sufficiently for us to go off for and explore so we decided, as Toba was very quiet, renting scooters would be good idea. In the end this was one of our ‘good ideas’ that did in fact turn out to be a good idea. Although, it was a close run thing when Ashleigh got on her bike and nearly drove straight into the shop at the end of the street with the lady who rented us the scooters running after her obviously deciding that loaning us her precious scooters perhaps wasn’t the best idea. But we all quickly got the hang of things and rather slowly set off to explore, Ashley on her own bike and Rachel
on the back of mine. After a while of exploring the coast line of the island and a slight run in with some roaming buffalo we decided to head back via ‘the stone chairs.’ This is where important village matters were traditionally discussed and they had special chairs for executions where the Batak people used to eat part of the executeds flesh as punishment. After this we headed back, had a few drinks and packed ready to head off to Berastagi the next day to climb the volcanoes. Lake Toba was stunning and whilst there wasn’t huge amounts to do it was a fantastic place to chill out (and be ill) for a couple of days.
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Gill Carr
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Sickness & scooters
Sounds like this was an interesting time! Glad to hear that everyone is ok now but you could probably have all done with a rest anyway.