Danau means Lake in Bahasa Indonesia (the Indonesian language), so (as you may have already worked out if you are super brainy) this post is about our visit to a lake called Lake Toba. This is in North Sumatra, Indonesia. Which means - that's right! - we've left Malaysia and flown across the Strait of Malacca, to land on Sumatra, the world's sixth largest island, and the largest island completely in Indonesia (Borneo and New Guinea, though larger, are not entirely Indonesian (as in the former case you already know because we've been to Malaysian Borneo on this trip)). We landed in Medan, the largest city in Sumatra, and the capital of the state of North Sumatra (confusingly not the northernmost state in Sumatra, which is Aceh). Medan is a bit of a hole, but we stayed in the delightful Swiss-Belinn, allowing us to watch TV in our hotel room rather than go outside where there's bugger all to see (meaning we've seen some of the Olympics, but I digress).
Fortunately there's more to North Sumatra than Medan (hence us coming here). Which is where Lake Toba comes in. The largest lake in Indonesia, it is also the largest volcanic lake in the world (I'm all geographical facts today, it would seem). It's 100km long and 30km wide, and was formed some 70,000 years ago by a MASSIVE volcanic explosion (the largest known explosive eruption anywhere on Earth in the last 25 million years, it caused global temperatures to plummet by between 3 and 15 degrees C and may have caused a fair few extinction events and depleted the world population of humans at that time by such an extent that the genetic effects of the resulting bottleneck are still noticeable today (according to some sources, anyway)). It's also really beautiful (which is why we were there).
We stayed on Pulau Samosir, an island in the middle of the lake (actually it's not really an island as it's connected to the mainland by a narrow isthmus but we had to get a ferry there so it's an island in my book), in a town confusingly named Tuktuk. There we spent several days relaxing, sunbathing (mainly Katie), diving and jumping into the lake (mainly me) and enjoying the local food (both of us) while being slightly incredulous at the sheer amount of time it takes to get served dinner in Indonesia (around 50 minutes per meal even in a completely empty restaurant, apparently regardless of the type of restaurant (though we've not yet tried McDonald's)).
One thing we did do that was more interesting than swimming in the resort swimming pool or reading was hire out a scooter for a day trip buzzing around the island. This was great fun, with Katie and I taking it in turns driving while the other rode on the back of the bike. The roads were largely devoid of traffic, the sun was out, the landscape was beautiful - it was wonderful. We spent the morning shooting around the coast of the island, then drove across the isthmus to the mainland and treated ourselves to a dip in the natural volcanic hot springs there (the only holdover from the area's enormously volcanic past). At this point the day was looking a decent contender for being one of the best days we'd had on our trip.
A Batak house, with its distinctive curved roof (the Bataks are the people who live in this area of Sumatra)
Katie puts her foot down
Heated by volcanic activity
Mmmmmm
Then we decided to go a different way back to Tuktuk. Rather than going back around the island, we thought we'd go over the top - the guidebook said that there were spectacular views there, and our map showed the roads going across that way.
Thanks guidebook/map.
The road started out fine, and then deteriorated until it looked like this:
This was not easy to navigate on a scooter with two people weighing it down. As we climbed higher, however, things got worse. The road started looking like this:
The reason Katie is riding the bike in all these pictures is because her morale was too low to take snaps when I was riding it
In some places we had to have one person dismount because the bike would have scraped and bumped too much with two on it. At this point morale was low. The locals we passed were few and far between, and were all greatly amused to see two foreigners on a scooter in the middle of nowhere. Still, they all responded to our questions of how best to get to Tuktuk by pointing us onward. The road must improve soon, we reasoned. Then we went into the forest. Then the road started looking like this:
You might notice now that this is less "road" and more "bad footpath". Why would the locals have sent us this way? Was this some sort of vicious wind-up? It was pretty much always one on the bike, one walking at this point. We were thus at walking pace, and were glancing nervous eyes at the sun, which was getting a little bit low in the sky. Then the road turned into this:
Morale on the floor, we soldiered on, largely in silence. All in all, this forest section lasted 5km and took an awful long time. The few locals we met passed us on much better bikes, and when we questioned them as to how far we had to go replied with figures varying between 5km and 50km, apparently having misunderstood us.
With hope of getting back before dark diminishing, though, the trees cleared and we found ourselves on a plateau. Houses and phone lines reappeared. The road, though, remained stubbornly unpaved: we had swapped claustrophobic jungle hell for agoraphobic plateau hell. But then, while Katie wrestled the bike over dried puddles ahead, round a bend in the round and down a dip I spotted - holy of holies! - a paved road! I lifted my arms in the air in celebration, and ran to catch her, pausing to take a photo of this shrine in thanks to whatever God it is in devotion to for providing us a route home before nightfall.
Thank you, animist Batak spirit of some description (or possibly Jesus (or possibly just some bloke's tomb))
Once back on the road, it was child's play to zip off in the wrong direction, then stop and ask some locals "just to make sure we're going the right way", then sheepishly head back. "11km" the locals said it was to Tuktuk. We made it 17 or so. Still, we got back in the end. Despite it not being one of the best days of our trip (in fact one of the worst) it was still a valuable experience, and should be a lesson to all those who would drive in Indonesia that maps, locals, and guidebooks are not necessarily to be trusted. The guidebook was right about one thing, though: the view was lovely up there.
Shame our camera doesn't really do it justice (neither did our mood)
No comments:
Post a Comment