The Canibal King's Dinner Table

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Indonesia, Sumatra, Lake Toba, Ambarita,
22-o2-2009.

I leave the quiet foreigner's enclave of Tuk Tuk and walk the 5 kilometer to the pretty village of Ambarita enjoying the typical smell of pine trees and the singing of birds.

Wooden houses, chicken with cicklets idling around in the undergrowth, a few happy pigs dozing in pools of mud, kids following me asking the usual questions trying to practise their English and hoping for a free school pen, maybe bon-bons or Dutch coins, a couple of scarwny village dogs that can't be bothered to give my Ferringi heels a bit of chase. The whole village breathes an air of neglect and boredom.

Ambarita has got a huge souvenir market with junk, junk and more junk spilling out in the dusty street and nobody around to release the bored looking sellers of their wares. Not bothering to give it a try on me probably realising that I have no intentions whatsoever to drag a lot of cr*p around the world though a young Batak lady asks me "Hey you not remeber me from last night, I was in your room"? Good joke but I allow her to drag me inside her shop for a cup of tea and bisquits.

She shows me around the village too explaining me about the Canibal King's Dinner Table, a group of stone chairs and table in the heart of Ambarita where the Western missionaries after getting their heads chopped off at an adjoining courtyard where uncermoniously dissected, carved up and eaten with the Canibal King getting the juicyest parts.

The whole of the village would watch in expectation while these poor sods, these so-called Men of God who had come from far away contaminated by religious fevour and convinced of the rightiousness of their ways, would be beheaded, a swift movement of the axe and a Ferringi head would fly through the air subjected to the merciless teeth of the stray village dogs - the same ones I saw earlier today while walking into the village?

This Souvenir Lady seems to really get some sort of weird fun out of telling me the most gory details, almost like a physical org*sm of some sort!!!

By the time I'm hiking on to the 16 km. further away village of Simanindo I feel shaken to my very core and though the views across Lake Toba are breath-taking my day has already been spoiled thanks to Miss Souvenir Lady!!!

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Photos

The Canibal King's Dinner Tabel
in Ambarita

the road to Simanindo
on Lake Toba

Entering the village of...
Ambarita

Miss Souvenir Lady
in Ambarita