Day 287: Organizational Day

The last day at the lake was pretty overcast, and the three of us were all in the middle of long travelling stints, with more to come, so we spent much of the day planning our onward journeys and making preparations. For me this was mostly just research and contacting people in Australia I was hoping to stay with, but one of the others had to hunt all over town for a decent exchange rate to convert cash and trying to book a bus going further south.

Other than that, we just spent the day walking around and playing with all the dogs around town, a few of whom we got to know quite well in our few days there. We spent the afternoon watching a few movies on somebody's laptop back in our room and went for another swim and watched another sun set over the ridge of the lake.

Day 286: Single's Night

We decided we didn't really want to do anything too involved on the island, and we began the morning by opening the door, taking the 3 steps to the lake and jumping in for a swim. In the little cottage rooms above and beside us were 4 young Finnish men who were hanging out and swimming around, and we chatted with them for awhile.

After drying off we walked around the loop on the peninsula that makes up Tuk-Tuk, looking for food and for a place to use wifi since our guest house had none. Periodically through the day we'd see young men dressed up in suits with ties and elaborate plumed hats and sashes on, and by talking with a few of them we learned that there was a big festival going on in town in the evenings. Apparently once every 5 years all the young single men and women (and their families, and people just looking to party) from all the neighboring villages come for a festival/dance, basically to try to hook up with a prospective spouses. This sounded too culturally weird/awesome to pass up, so in the evening we met up for dinner with our Finnish friends (they had been on the island quite a bit longer, and took us to a much better restaurant than the earlier ones we'd had), then followed the sound of music through the city and the road away from the buildings of the town.

It was made pretty clear to us that we weren't to dance, and we sat to the side with what was presumably family members and well-wishers. Since none of what was going on was in english it was a bit hard to follow at times, but there was an MC who would walk around talking, and then the band would break out into the song. I say -the- song because there was only one. By the end of two days of this festival I got quite tired of it. I don't really understand why they have a large band to play the exact same traditional song over and over and over. They should just tape it and save some money next time. Anyway, once the music was going the two groups (male and female) would start dancing and slowly approach each other, dance a bit, then break back apart to their seperate groups when the music stopped. This happened over and over, and I guess eventually some prospectives paired up. In the next phase, All these matched pairs lined up facing a group of family members in an opposing line, and there was a sort of weird tug-of-war dance where one side would force the other side backwards, then they would reverse. All the singles who failed to meet anybody got to stand around feeling left out.

Afterwards the dance broke into more of a free-for-all (still the same song). A few of the Finns stuck around but most of us headed back to our sheds for the night.

Day 285: Trip to Toba

I had arranged for a tourist van to take me from Bukit Lawang to Lake Toba via Medan. Medan isn't really along the way, but the company swings by there to drop off people flying out and pick up more people, and all the best (barely) roads go from Medan, so it's the easiest route. Unfortunately the "best" roads are still pretty terrible, and traffic was very busy with everybody coming back to the city after the holidays. None of the roads are ever more than two lanes, and all the scooters on the road make travel a real pain. The total journey from Bukit Lawang to Medan to Lake Toba is only about 200km but that ended up taking us 10 hours to complete with all the traffic, rain and accidents along the way. I had been travelling from Bukit Lawang with an American girl, and when we finally got to the town of Parapat on the shore of Lake Toba it was just before the last ferry to the island departed, so we quickly rushed aboard. On the ferry across we met an American guy, and the three of us agreed to look for a place to share on the island.

I should explain a bit about Lake Toba and Samosir Island. Lake Toba isn't just a lake, but a supervolcano that erupted 75,000 years ago in what was the largest explosion in the last 25 million years. The result (beyond dropping the world's temperature substantially and destroying 20,000 km^2) was the Lake Toba caldera and Samosir island, which is nearly 30km long in the middle of the lake. We were heading for a little town called Tuk Tuk on the island to relax for a few days before continuing on our seperate journeys.

We spent a long time looking for a particular hostel one of them had had recommended, and were all pretty tired by the time we found it. They only really had one room available, and it was a pretty terrible room. I won't get into the details, but the horribleness of the room was balanced by the price (we paid $2 each / night), 2 ridiculously affectionate pudgy puppies that kept us company, and one of the most beautiful views of the lake.

Day 284: Tubing Home

The second day of my 2 day trek was a bit disappointing, since we didn't really do any hiking at all. We did a short walk in the morning, but it was only half an hour to go up to the hilltop garden near where we slept. After lounging around for the morning we got ready to tube back down the river to town. We sealed all our packs in plastic bags and hopped into the tubes. Local guides manned the front and back of our tube-raft to steer us away from rocks, and we were off. It was maybe a 45 minute ride back to town, and had some pretty exciting sections along the way. There was nothing wild enough to risk flipping us, but by the time we got back we were thoroughly soaked.

I had a relaxed afternoon. I booked my trip out of town for the following day and spent most of the day along the riverside, enjoying the day and watching people have fun in the water.

Day 283: Monkey Business

On New Year's day we finally got the jungle trek under way. We had a small group of our guide, an older but fit Australian, and my lumbering Swiss friend Peter. I was a bit skeptical at first how much of a "trek" it would be with two older men, especially since I'd had a good sample of Peter's fitness the day before. Much to my delight, our guide didn't take things easy for them, and while we did have to slow down a bit for Peter and take a few more breaks that I would have liked, the hiking was intense. We were climbing hundreds of meters up steep rock faces, sliding down clay and mud banks, pulling ourselves up slopes by the roots of trees, and almost always either ascending or descending. Our focus was on finding animals, and the different guides would text each other when things of interest were spotted, and we'd take off trying to find them. Through the course of the day we saw gibbons, macaques (which are the usual monkey seen everwhere in SE Asia), Thomas Leaf Monkeys, and two different orangutans, which are the real prize of the national park.

The rest house we stayed at for the night was alongside the river. Luckily we didn't have to stay in a tent, since it rained rather hard all night again, but we were in the open air under a tin roof. Dinner was a vegetarian mix of dishes from things grown in the jungle nearby, as was the dessert of passion fruit, bananas, pineapple and oranges.

Day 282: Bat Cave and a New Year

I got up early in the morning for my trek only to be disappointed by learning it was being postponed a day. According to the planner it was because other tourists had chickened out because of the rain through the night, but I also suspect the guide was eager to stay in town and party for New Year's. I was a bit bummed, since it meant I'd have to stay in town for New Year's as well, and it would probably force me to cut out something else I wanted to do in Sumatra, but I was mostly just making everything up as I went anyway, so I wasn't too heartbroken.

Since I suddenly had a free day I started looking for alternative things to do, and was intrigued when I learned about a fairly extensive cave in the jungle. I ended up going with an incredibly awkward middle-aged Swiss man (more on him later). The organizer for our trek tried to convince us to take a guide, but he was telling us it would be about $10 each, which was ridiculous. $10 doesn't sound like much by our normal standards, but in Indonesia I've generally been able to get accomodations and all my meals for a day for $10, and services are even cheaper. Instead we went on our own, and near the cave met a local man who offered to show us the cave for a much more reasonable $1.50 each. [As an aside, I'm converting to familiar currency for your sake. $10 CDN is roughly 100,000 Indonesian Rupiah. Despite the nice clean conversion, I've had a bit of trouble with the currency because of how many decimal places are involved, and how many bills there are. The only coins in Indonesia are 100 and 500 rupiah, but for bills they have 1000, 2000, 5000, 10000, 20000, 50000, 100000. Having common bills of 1000,10000 and 100000 means that you're always having to double check exactly how much you're giving over. It's also the only country I've ever been to where I'm regularily inconvencieng people by making them try to break the equivelant of a $10 bill.]

I was very pleasantly surprised with the cave. It's totally undeveloped and getting through it requires climbing, crawling, and quite a bit of maneuvering and balance. It's a mix of total darkness you need flashlights to navigate and holes in the ceiling opening up to jungle and sky. The variety of the caves was a lot of fun, and while it wasn't a terribly hard workout for me, poor Peter (my Swiss companion) was covered in sweat and bruises by the time we exited.

After lunch I explored Bukit Lawang. The town is spread along both banks of the river with 3 plank foot bridges connecting the two sides. It's very touristy, but still manages to have some personality. One feature I found particularily funny was a guy that squatted down at the side of the path playing the watch-carefully-and-guess-what-cup-the-pea-is-under game. A crowd would stand around him and people would throw their money down on their pick, and then he'd turn up the cups and pay off any that guessed right. As far as I can remember, it's the only time I've ever actually seen somebody running that game in real life, and he seemed to be there consistently from morning to late evening every night I was there. Another major attraction in the town is tubing down the river. Foreign tourists often combine tubing from deep in the jungle as part of their trekking, but there were far more domestic tourists who were in town for the holidays and they would just set up along the river and spend the day picnicing and playing in the water, much like how we'd go out to the beach for the day.

I had dinner on the hostel's patio and spent the evening talking to an American volunteering in the area and some Europeans who were now living in Indonesia. My entire time in the country I'd been pretty surprised at how flirty and forward the girls were (in a few days I'd accumulated a small collection of phone numbers I could do nothing with and requests for my facebook/email address) and these middle-aged English and German men and their considerably younger Indonesian wives reinforced my suspicion that if I was ever desperately in need of a wife, Indonesia could probably provide me one in a hurry. A lot of the younger crowd in town set up bonfires along the river, and around 11:00 people started shooting off fireworks. Fireworks in Bukit Lawang was a bit worrisome. It felt a bit like the spiritual equivelant of lighting a stick of dynamite and tossing it into the air. It wasn't -quite- that extreme, but only just. The fireworks were about the same grade as you see in the big city-organized displays, only this was locals along the river shooting them off. They were often at quite low angles so they exploded close to buildings and jungle, and a lot of the people were just holding the fireworks as they launched them, which made me cringe. In the end, they made it to 2013 with nobody getting hurt and nothing burned down, and the effect of dozens of big fireworks being launched all up and down the river had an impressive effect.

Days 280-281: In and Out of Medan

As I said before, Medan isn't much of a tourist destination. The only real sights are a mix of temples, churches and mosques, and while at times these can be quite interesting, I wasn't really in the mood, especially after months of seeing similar things all over Asia. Instead I spent my time just walking around the city. I continued to do a lot of talking with locals, including flirtatious street food vendors, curious tuk tuk drivers and college students wanting to interview for school (4 different groups of them). I eventually got lost enough in the maze of streets that I had to get a tuk tuk ride back, but at least it was fairly inexpensive.

On my third day in Medan I stayed pretty close to the hostel. In the afternoon I was picked up by a tourist van going from Medan to Bukit Lawang, and spent the rest of the day on the road. Bukit Lawang is a small town along the Bahorok River right next to Gunung Leuser National Park. Bukit Lawang itself is almost entirely built to cater to both domestic and international tourists, and most people go there to trek in the park, particularily looking for wild orangutans. I got there in the evening after dark with the intention of heading into the jungle the next morning on a 2-day trek